Making of Lavasa, India’s first e-city

MUMBAI, INDIA: Located amidst the hilly terrain of beautiful Sahyadris, lush greenery with a lake view front is the city of Lavasa. This city is India’s first planned hilly township spread over 20,000 acres of land and situated some 60 kms away from Pune. Developed by Lavasa Corporation — a HCC Group company in a joint effort with Cisco and Wipro, the township will be the country’s first e-city equipped with IT and telecom infrastructure, connectivity and value added services to provide its residents a digital lifestyle experience of future.

Here, Vinod Vyas, Lavasa Corporation’s vice-president of IT talks with Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News about making of Lavasa as India’s first e-city, the digital lifestyle and services that will be experienced by the residents of the city, the building of IT infrastructure, challenges faced during the project initiation and much more.

Excerpts…

What makes Lavasa India’s first e-city?

It is the first and largest private hill city in the country. Once it is a private city, then of course the partnership is different, the approach is different, the ambiance we are creating is different. Since it’s a green field development, whatever coming up here has to be from scratch and that is the biggest differentiator. When it comes to other cities, they are already populated, have their infrastructure in place, hence making Lavasa different.

Since Lavasa is a green field where everything begins from scratch, we could design the city as per futuristic needs. Areas like telecom, e-governance, basic infrastructure, datacenter services and home connectivity are given extensive attention as part of its development. So that’s how it is different.

What kind of digital life the residents will experience and get exposure to?

We have targeted our residents and commercial establishments in such a way that the basic amenities are given. And they don’t even have to think about whether it is there or not. Value added and advanced services are also built into the basic infrastructure. For instance, when you feel a need of 1Gb speed of Internet, it is already there. The only thing you need is the equipment to connect.

Also, we are providing tourists coming to Lavasa with all the information about what the city offers, the locations and other things. There are hotspots and Wi-Fi available across the city for the tourist. Also the commercial establishments over there have almost all the facilities that are normally available in the STPs (software technology parks) and infotech parks.

What kinds of IT infrastructure and software applications are used to make Lavasa an e-city, which provides various services to people and commercial establishments?

The entire Information Communication and Technology (ICT) infrastructure is divided into three parts — the infrastructure, software services and the services. When it comes to infrastructure, we of course take care of fibers, cabling, connectivity and datacenters. For software part, we have recently partnered with Wipro and Cisco and are trying to use Cisco’s Smart + Connected communities. Besides, we are predominantly on Microsoft and SAP. We use Microsoft Dynamics; unified communications, utility software, ERP software and a range of other software has been implemented and is being implemented there.

For telecom services, we have partnered with telecom operators like Tata Tele Services. Apart from this, we have created our own GPON (gigabit passive optical network) architecture. GPON architecture will take care of complete wired and wireless services across the world. This is based on fiber connectivity and here the fiber is reaching directly at the villas or the homes.

What challenges were faced during the initial stage of the project?

When you take any project like SEZ, STP or any township developed by CIDCO, lots of telecom operators and telecom facilities are always there and you just need to take those facilities — which we call the last mile connectivity. But over here the last mile itself is 65 kms, so getting the mobility and telecom services itself was a big challenge while developing the city. So what will you do with no basic connectivity? You cannot use cloud, you cannot use any of the software without connectivity and so that was the biggest challenge.

But once that challenge was addressed, we studied various other cities across the globe. Because we have to really look into the scope of work or the functionalities that will be required to be offered here using various software and IT systems. Even though this is a city, we are not into government services. And we are more focused on building services using ICT and so after understanding and examining various modern cities across the world we built our own model for Lavasa city.