Non-standardised and non-interoperable information, communication and technology (ICT) solutions suffer from constraints and will pose a risk to smart city projects, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said on Tuesday.

Constraints include proprietary solutions with vendor lock-in; upgradation and scalability will also be proprietary and, hence, costly; replicability in other areas will be a challenge; and in disaster situations, it will be difficult to have integrated relief operations. TRAI said these in a white paper titled “Smart Cities in India: Framework for ICT Infrastructure”.

“With the emergence of new technologies and ICT domains such as artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, cloud computing, and Internet of Things (IoT), the importance of standardisation goes beyond interoperability required for completing the global digital single market,” TRAI said in the white paper.

Given the fast pace of changes in the world and its possible implications for our societies and workforce, policymaking aims to reap the maximum benefits from digital transformation, the paper said, adding that, in some instances, the availability of standards can become a recondition for implementing policy or legislation.

Seamless framework

“The safety and security of smart products, automated devices, and IoT, together with the reliability and validity of artificial intelligence, data and privacy protection, are challenges that may require standards to be developed and used for regulatory or public policy purposes,” it said.

To reap the benefits of efforts and initiatives of different sections of the government, administration and legislature, it is imperative that the instruments created individually by them are coherent and help to create a seamless homogenous framework in which standards, regulations and policies dovetail with one another, it said.

The TRAI paper said that policies provide the overarching statements of the intent, goals, and objectives, while standards function as rules to achieve the intent, and regulations provide the legal sanctity to the standards, and guidelines for the stakeholders to help realise the intent.

“Unless all three work in an absolutely coherent manner, no standards, policies, or regulations shall be implementable seamlessly,” it added.

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