Government of Karnataka, along with NUMA, SUEZ and BWSSB, releases first “DATACITY” program

The Government of Karnataka has announced the launch of the first “DATACITY” program in Asia in collaboration with SUEZ (French-based utility company which operates largely in the water treatment and waste management), BWSSB and NUMA, a French innovation hub headquartered in Paris that engages with startups, cities and corporations to foster innovation and solve global challenges. DATACITY is an international open innovation program building innovative solutions to answer the challenges of global cities. It brings together city authorities, corporates and startups to address cities' challenges and develop innovative solutions to build sustainable and efficient cities, using data and technology.

DataCity is a 7-month long program that aims at bringing together the City of Bengaluru and the Corporates to co-create a problem statement, to identify relevant innovative startups from a pool of applications and to experiment the solutions that is crafted using data provided by the city of Bengaluru and the corporates.

The areas of opportunity that could be explored during DataCity are: Smart Mobility, Water and Waste Management, Energy, Smart Buildings, Transparency & Security and pollution management.

Gaurav Gupta, IAS, says, “Growing cities are facing tremendous challenges in terms of services and infrastructure provision. We must join our forces to find solutions. Collaboration is the key to innovation: it is the smart collaboration that will help build smarter cities. The first stage is to define the problem areas and work towards it.”

According to Shyam J. Bhan (MD / CEO, SUEZ INDIA BA), “Our collaboration with NUMA has been to support the Group's digital strategy for the development of resilient and sustainable cities. SUEZ participated in the DataCity open innovation program, organized since 2015 by the NUMA incubator with the City of Paris, the French State and private sector companies, which aimed to meet the challenges of cities with the help of data. The program transformed Paris into a gigantic playground to test new urban solutions devised by entrepreneurs through the use of existing data.”

Souad Tenfiche, CEO, NUMA, Bengaluru, comments, “70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. We need to address today our urban challenges to build the cities of tomorrow. NUMA designed DataCity to help creating these concrete solutions with the potential to be replicated and scaled across cities of the global DataCity network.”