While there has been a lot of discussion about 'smart cities', the concept of 'smart villages' has received somewhat less attention. In certain contexts where there is a well-developed village infrastructure (such as in India and China), smart villages, as a technologically advanced highly networked decentralized model of social development, may have a significant role to play.

In this seminar, we explore the concept of a smart village from several perspectives including architectural, economic, resource-planning and organizational. In doing this, we try to understand the ideas of Abdul Kalam, the 11th President of India, who through his concept of PURA (Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas) clearly saw the importance of villages in his vision of India as a developed nation. We ask whether it is feasible to develop a template, framework, algorithm that can be deployed to turn a village into a smart village. Unlike smart cities which involve the building of physical infrastructure, the focus of a smart village may be more on a total model that gives individuals and communities the opportunity to explore their own creative genius.

Invited Speakers 

Terry Beaubois
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University

Solomon Darwin
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

V. Ponraj
Scientific Advisor to Late President Kalam

Y. S. Rajan
Co-author of India 2020 (with Late President Kalam)