HCMC starts building smart city to create conveniences for citizens Ho Chi Minh City will apply science and technology in any possible field to bring conveniences for the daily life of citizens instead of waiting until 2020 or 2025 when the smart city project has been completed, said deputy chairman of the city People’s Committee Tran Vinh Tuyen.   According to Mr. Tuyen, the smart city project aims to successfully implement seven breakthrough programs which the 10th HCMC Party Committee's congress has approved in the phase of 2016-2020. The project will focus on building e-government to improve state management efficiency, transparency and publicity and reduce inconveniences for local citizens and businesses. Another focus of the project is to develop an open database center used for the entire society except classified information and national security. The database center will cover many fields including planning, education, health and traffic. In fact, the city has built a database system. However, it has been scattered and unconnected together and just served the operation of authorized agencies. So the city will task a qualified agency to take responsibility for building the open database center, which will be updated continuously and used for solving the urban problems such as traffic jam and flooding. For instance, rainfall data will be collected from modern devices and transferred to the center for scientists to analyze and choose the best solution to cope with flooding or at least give forecasts for citizens. The project’s target is to provide better quality of life for citizens and improve urban management efficiency, creating a foundation for socioeconomic development and environmental protection. Citizens will be the main beneficiary of the project. Therefore they will contribute in developing public services by sending feedbacks to relevant agencies about each service they use. In addition, the project will enable people to supervise government activities through the public and transparent management model. The city will collect citizens’ opinions, opponents and suggestions to from the start of building the project. HCMC has 10 million citizens excluding three million nonresidents and been the first locality in the country to develop the smart city model. So it is feared that the city will meet with many difficulties. Mr. Tuyen said that HCMC has many advantages for instance leading the country in science and technology application and having an abundant human resource. The smart city has been built successfully in many countries so the city can learn from their experiences. Many of them have paid attention to the city’s plan and wanted to give assistances, he added. Besides budget revenue, the deputy chairman said the city could mobilize other sources to implement the project such as official development fund. The most difficulty of a smart city is that science and technology has kept innovating and citizens’ demand has also been developing, requiring the project to be built feasibly with suitable steps. Therefore, Mr. Tuyen suggested city leaders of all tenures to determine to build the smart city and get results on schedule. Moreover, the project’s implementation will raise matters beyond the city’s jurisdiction. Hence local authorities must be patient to explain and propose higher authority levels to approve them. There will be no stepping point in building the smart city because of continuously innovative science and increasing citizens’ demand. Therefore, the smart city development will be continuous, concluded Mr. Tran Vinh Tuyen. SGGP