Telangana has joined hands with WRI India Ross Center to start Smart Streets Lab in a bid to improve road safety and security in the city with the help of technology.

The Lab will pilot a few road safety and women safety solutions using IT solutions to ensure secure, equitable and easy-to-navigate roads for the residents of Hyderabad. After evaluating the pilots, these solutions will be scaled up to cover more areas.

“The pilots will use smart devices and Internet of Things solutions to collect and analyse data for arriving at meaningful solutions to ease the traffic and ensure security,” a state government official said.

Citing the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highway data, the statement said the total number of road accidents in the country had gone up by 2.5 per cent to 5,01,423 from 4,89,400.

“Fatalities also increased by 4.6 per cent to 1,46,133 from 1,39,671 during the period,” it said.

“Civic authorities can transform roads into ‘smart streets’ by catering to the mobility needs of different users such as the differently-abled, the elderly, children and women, and not just vehicles,” it said.

Online challenge In order to get ideas from the public, the WRI India has announced an online challenge (www.wricitieshub.org/smartstreetslab), seeking applications for projects designed to make Hyderabad’s streets ‘smart’.

The challenge will invite innovations that are infrastructure-independent, easy to integrate into the existing systems and are affordable till September 1. The challenge is open to projects led by civil society, entrepreneurs, technology companies and partnerships.

About 10 shortlisted projects will be called for a boot camp. DLABS, the incubation and acceleration arm of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Bosch and WRI India will train the candidates for the pilot design and implementation.

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