AmCham’s Smart City Consortium members had a detailed interaction with USTDA and it’s smart city specialists, the technical advisory team, at ACSA, U.S. Embassy on November 30th. The technical advisory team will advise their Indian partners on best practices for integrated smart city planning and infrastructure development. These experts led by Mr. Doug Shuster, President and CEO of Emerging Markets Infrastructure (EMI), interacted with our smart city group members, to understand the on-the-ground action and extent of involvement of U.S. companies in various smart city programs across a number of cities in India. Based on the understanding of the U.S. companies’ capabilities and readiness to bid for and offer solutions, the technical team will be visiting three cities to do a needs assessment survey and provide on the ground support in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan to recommend solutions to their smart city planning and infrastructure development objectives.

A number of issues and challenges as presented under the smart city campaign, for a robust U.S. private sector engagement were discussed – especially challenges of cost competencies, procurement policies and implementation level capacity deficiencies. It was decided that a core group of interested members would lead engagements in several identified cities for which a city-specific approach will be taken and capabilities to counter the needs of those cities will be presented. Simultaneously companies wherever feasible, will make efforts to engage with technical consultants who are assisting the state governments in drawing up their smart city master plans.