VERVEMAGAZINE.IN 19Around 2016, I was tasked with setting up the
Intellecap Innovation Lab, with the objective of
using technologies such as artificial intelligence
(AI) and internet of things (IoT) to solve social
challenges. It was a dream job! I kept thinking about
where to start — my team and I had done a tonne of
thinking around this, but I always felt like an ‘“element
X’” was missing.
One night while I was randomly flipping through
channels, I ended up watching Elysium (2013),
a science fiction film where the ‘happy ending’
saw robotic spaceships dispatched to a poverty-
stricken Earth to provide medical care. That was my
first aha moment. We implemented AI and IoT to
bring doctor-less preventive care for patients with
diabetes, hypertension and cardiac issues living in a
Bengaluru slum at a very low cost — less than two
dollars annually per person.
Another example is our launch of India’s first and
largest virtual incubation platform, StartupWave in 2012.
It was built to give support to entrepreneurs outside of
major towns and cities. This support was channelled
through a blend of online learning and mentoring via
a web-based platform as well as in-person workshops
and demo days for shortlisted start-ups.
The importance of technology in enhancing
urbanisation as envisioned by Lakeer
Today, our cities only work for a minority of our
citizens — we’d like to see them shift towards
working for everyone by being more inclusive and
also become more prosperous and sustainable.
This means better access to jobs, better public
transport, cleaner air, more affordable homes and
greater attention to those aspects that determine
our quality of life.
Our specific mission is to build the case for more
data-driven governance of cities. Indian cities are
significantly under-resourced. Data-driven planning
and thoughtful use of our limited urban resources
can make our cities work for their most important
stakeholders — the citizens.
We largely work with remote sensing, GIS
analytics and government data in Lakeer. We’ve
built a free, open-source product called CitySight
(launched in 2018), which is a user-friendly and
map-based data visualisation tool that evaluates the
quality of life in cities based on granular data. City
leaders can drill down to streets and roof-top levels
to make better decisions about where to prioritise
their resources.The benefits of smart design in urban planning
Smart design is at the heart of urban planning. Not
just in terms of thinking about infrastructure but,
more importantly, also about governance systems,
economies and ecologies of cities.
So much of traditional urban planning is anchored
in rigid master plans that largely focus on defining the
use of land — residential, commercial, and industrial.
This doesn’t really help cities grow and prosper in the
real world. So, the biggest shifts have to be putting
people at the centre of urban planning and taking a
multidisciplinary design approach. One way would
be to make cities function for their most vulnerable
citizens, like children for instance, which in turn
would make them work for everyone else. If we were
to redo our entire public transport network with
children in mind — we would ensure much better end-
to-end connectivity, safety, ease of climbing into and
out of vehicles, the placement of clear signs on how
to move around and easy payment mechanisms.Her inspirations
I’ve had many inspirations, but this past year I’ve
spent a lot of time thinking about two of them and
wondering what they would do if they were in my
shoes. The first is Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy,
who founded Aravind Eye Care — an institution that
is now directly or indirectly responsible for more
than 40 per cent of the eye care services delivered
across all countries in the developing world. His
biography is one of the most inspiring books I’ve
ever read on how to take a complex problem like
preventable blindness and build an entire institution
to solve every facet of it.
The second is urbanist, author and journalist Jane
Jacobs. She transformed how we think about planning
cities and what makes them thrive, and she moved
the entire practice of urban planning towards a more
human-centric approach that is grounded in how the
world actually works. She rose in an incredibly male-
dominated field and took on and won against a system
that was biased against the common people.