Hitachi India and Siemens signed a MoU with CII in the capital today to form a consortium that would create pilots and replicate them throughout the country for setting up 100 smart cities. The MoU was signed on behalf of Hitachi by their MD, Ichiro Iino and MD, Siemens, Sunil Mathur and DG, CII Chandrajit Banerjee in the presence of DIPP secretary Amitabh Kant.

Amitabh Kant said that while cities occupy only 3% of the total geographical area of the world, they contribute nearly 80% of GDP and 2/3rd of global emissions. Hence, there was a challenge to do urbanisation in an innovative and systematic manner.

Kant said that learnings gathered from the best practices across the world in the management of water, public resources, public spaces and technology etc shall be shared while implementing the smart cities concept in India. He said that smart city initiative shall be driven by technology driven companies.

Earlier, in his address, DG,CII said that this MoU provides a platform for coming together of leading technology companies such as Hitachi and Siemens and this will enable the implementation of vision of hundred smart cities.