Thread by @digitaldutta

Long Thread on National Urban Innovation Stack. The draft was announced on Jan 30 with only 15 days for consultation. This is yet another stack in the lines of India stack, health stack, digital sky. Being built by Nandan Nilekani's @eGovFoundation smartnet.niua.org/nuis

The urban stack will have a set of 7 components,
Data exchanges/marketplaces,
India Urban Connect,
Smart Procure - tenders/contracts,
Research & Innovation for Urban India,
National Urban Learning Platform,
Smart Code,
Smart Governance,

The document has interesting terms like bridging digital divide between cities, yes before bridging the poverty gap. Most urban local bodies don't recognise slums, if they do they will have to rehabilitate them. So slums don't exist on data. But here is a stack which wants data

National Urban Innovation Stack wants to promote open data to give data back to citizens, researchers like RTI & data marketplaces for firms to sell data. These two can't co exist. You can either have open data which belongs to everyone in the city or you have data for corporates

Urban Stack follows stack approach similar to #Aadhaar because the same crony capitalists building these things everywhere. Urban Stack will set the digital standards for smart cities, something which Bureau of Indian Standards is tasked to do. But hey @eGovFoundation will do it

So far in the smart cities space there are not enough digital standards adopted in India. Private players were pushing proprietary standards part of all the smart city projects, what that means is you can't move away from Microsoft, IBM once your city implements their solutions

But here is a private player @eGovFoundation backed by @NandanNilekani which wants to define India's digital standards to the convenience of private players. Why do I say that, because urban stack has already been decided by them. They are building it, why not @NICMeity

The document talks about privacy, accountability, transparency, trust, participation, collaboration. But the fact remains @eGovFoundation has a poor track record on safeguarding privacy or even being accountable. They leaked #Aadhaar data of people in AP

https://twitter.com/digitaldutta/status/1013603917106565120

Coming back to specific components, Urban India Connect will simply bring down accountability requirements part of tender process as this enables them to define the tenders for projects. Basically urban governance going into hands of IT firms and investors.

Smart Procure is to help bring all city tenders online to help startups bid for city projects, As much as I love this idea most urban local bodies don't even publish their budget online. Most tenders after being awarded become secret document suddenly, will this be any different?

Research & Innovation for Urban India wants to give all data to research organisations, but which research institutes? Will Osmania university, JNU or other states Universities get any? As someone who worked on smart cities in IITs, data is there only for closed academic papers

Coming to smart governance, here is software which will have all the urban taxes data, which is forcing everyone to pay through private players. All the utilities data is being centralised for credit scores. How is this privacy by design?

All the things this document talks about is a bunch of bull shit terms made to look like the Government is doing something. Innovation, digital divide, philanthropy in cities. In reality it is a document written by @eGovFoundation's Policy Head for profit in.linkedin.com/in/gauthamravi…

All things said, nothing has happened in 5 years in the field of smart cities, at the end of elections we get this nice shiny document which wants to propose standards now. It's too late and not required. Specifically when it is being built by the likes of @eGovFoundation