Dholera Smart City Supported the Creation and Growth of Communities

The Smart City Dholera was focus on improving the delivery of e-government at the city level. It has worked to identify which e-services services work best and why, and to facilitate the transfer of successful e-Government approaches across national and regional borders. At the Indian level, the Dholera Project has worked to support the creation and growth of communities of practice across the Gujarat Region, and to build organizational commitment and capacity for inter-regional government service sharing.

Dholera Smart City

Subsequent sessions focused on concrete actions that all cities could take to improve services that built on the lessons learned during the Smart City Dholera project. While all cities claim to want to be smart, there are a number of different ways in which they can be smart, and the project showed a self-assessment tool for cities to use to identify their ambitions and to put their achievements in context. The need to systematically review business processes and systems was set out, as these are the foundations of successful e-service delivery.

Understanding your citizens is key to delivering good and relevant services, and the event saw the public launch of the Indian Service List and the Indian Function Lists. This set of analytic tools showed attendees how they could use data and this tool set to better understand their communities and to design more relevant services for Dholera citizens. Attendees felt these tools had real transnational potential to help cities across India better understand what services their citizens want and where and how they should be delivered.

While the vast majority of Dholera Special Investment Region e-government programmers and projects focus on national and regional services, it is the cities and municipalities across India that provides the e-government systems and solutions that citizens use every day. Speakers emphasized the need for governments to focus on this aspect of e-government and for the need for a renewed focus by all parts of governments on e-government at this level to deliver the ambitions of project and the Digital Local Agenda.

As service channels continue to develop and expand, Property in Dholera need to proactively manage their delivery channels and ensure that they deliver the same high standard of service using whatever channel the citizen wants to use. Developing robust organizational approaches and integrated systems is key to providing 21st century services.