Digitalizing Nasik to transform it into a Smart City

Begins during the Kumbh Mela

With WeSchool students contributing their mite in a great collaborative effort in Kumbhathon by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston) USA

Kumbhathon is  aligned to the national agenda of Digital India. The themes and solutions that have emerged from here as DIGITAL NASIK are to emerge as customer centric business opportunities that will also facilitate governance. Kumbhathon, that was started as an initiative to find solutions for Kumbh Mela has now have ended up as the testing ground for various projects to convert a city into a smart city.

All shops on-line

Company name: Central wall

Innovators : Sanchi Paingy and Richa Agrawal,PGDM

Central wall creates a platform for all the shops in the city to register online so the vendors can meet its potential customers. Currently it is not an ecommerce website it only provides information about the shops basics and its key specialties.

Work-in status

• The users can search information based on location, keyword, and category.
• Top 10 nearest locations information is shown on the webpage and app.
• The shop address along with latitude and longitude is stored in the system so if the user searches for a chemist his GPS will be captured and the chemist shops GPS will be computed and the shortest distance shops will be listed in the top searches.
• A webpage is already created www.centralwall.in
• The basic android app is also created
• A data base of around 1000shops around Nashik road is collected ,with the help from students of  Purushottam school  and Colleges like NDMVP, Arambh&Bytco

Challenges:

• Double entry of the data in the system after it is collected from the field.
• To map all the shops with the exact location.

How we tackled:

We created an application, which will have digital form that has to be filled by the volunteer that will help registering the shopkeeper and also exact GPS latitude longitude tracker installed in the app to tackle both the problem.

Future Prospect

1. scale up this project across India
2. subscription model for the shops post Kumbhathon
3. Every shops webpage to be created with maps and photos
4. Advertisement space for the shops on webpage

Key  takeaways: We School’s relations with the MIT has always given student a platform to getopportunities to apply the management skills learned in classrooms in the live projects. This even has helped us apply our MBA skills in true sense with bunch of engineers. It has helped us build interpersonal relations with people with different background who could help us if we aspire to be  an entrepreneur in the future. It also taught us how collaboration can result in speeding up the event success. In no time Kumbhathon bought all the essential stakeholders join hand together and make Nasik a smart city.