ITS Challenges in India

India has already made a foray into ITS in organizing traffic, more extensive and urgent integration of advanced technology and concepts into mainstream traffic management is imperative. A number of prototype ITS projects have already been introduced in various cities which have focused on isolated deployments of parking information, area-wide signal control, and advanced toll collection. However, there are only few fully developed ITS applications with traffic management centers in India. TrafficInfraTech spoke to some of the ITS professionals.

Even though various technologies have been successfully implemented in developed nations, several challenges still exist in replicating similar systems in India. Chikara Kikuchi, Managing Director, Zero-Sum ITS Solutions India Pvt Ltd, explained,

 India is such a diverse country that every city has its own unique set of urban challenges including traffic/infrastructure problems, driving patterns and languages.

“An ITS solution in India needs to be cost effective, easy to implement and have less human intervention. Due to unavailability of skilled personnel on the ground level of the traffic police, technology should be adapted as per the local language of the populace. Most of the ITS solutions in the developed nations were setup at huge costs borne by city governments or local traffic police. In India, the high cost of ITS systems undermines its importance to local city governments.”

Currently there is a lack of definite guidelines & regulations for nationwide ITS architecture and framework. ITS systems cannot just be modelled on existing successful ITS solutions of other nations due to basic inherent driver behaviour and conditions in India.

India has been very slow in adopting available technologies in the realm of intelligent transportation system. The most obvious reasons among them are the distinct geographical, cultural and demographical differences from other countries. Nilanjan Chakravortty, General Manager-Transport & Traffic, CMS Computers Ltd, explained, “The major cities that have limited infrastructure see the largest growth in vehicle population in the country. It is a self-restricting process – the higher the pressure on the infrastructure, the larger is the challenge for deployment of technology. In most cases, deployment  of available technologies will hardly create any significant impact. What India needs is improvisation of existing technologies, a ‘desi’ version – a customized deployment rather than an as-is implementation. That is where home grown Traffic management companies will play a bigger role than the international players. What has worked in London may not work in Bangalore; or what has worked in Sydney may not be the right solution for Delhi.”