- Indian cities have been commissioning digital twin models of themselves—for disaster management, traffic control, and urban planning
- So far, these models have largely been used to track down unpaid property tax cases
- While there is a national policy for building digital twins, the execution has been left to urban local bodies, which is limiting their use
- Genesys, the company behind most of these models, is turning to the private sector as its next big customers
Every monsoon, the engineers at Khadakwasla dam, just outside Pune in Maharashtra, have a tough calculation on their hands. They have to decide when to open the gates and how far to let the Mutha River flood the city.
Whatever they decide, parts of Pune will go under, as the last three monsoons have shown. In July 2024, the dam released 35,000 cubic feet of water a second, displacing over 4,000 people across the city. This July, residents of Ekta Nagari, a neighbourhood situated right on the riverbank, received warnings at night to move their belongings off the ground floor, hours before some of the dam gates were opened.
Keeping the gates shut is, unfortunately, not an option. Rainfall in the hills to the west fills the reservoirs along the Mutha River and its tributaries—the very ones which supply Pune’s drinking water. The engineers need to keep it as full as possible to last the city until the next monsoon. But once the dams fill up, the gates have to be opened, and the river downstream swells almost immediately. The calculation is about getting the timing just right.
This is exactly the kind of problem a city’s digital twin is designed to solve.
Pune has one too. In April 2024, the city’s municipal corporation hired Mumbai-based Genesys International to build a twin of the city: a 3D model, updated regularly, with predictive analysis that can run several “what-if” scenarios—like, what if we open all the 11 gates of the dam at 5.30 am on a rainy Sunday in July. In a demo seen by The Ken, the model showed which parts of the city would go under at a given rainfall or river level.
But instead, in Pune, so far, the technology is being used to find property-tax defaulters. In May this year, nearly Rs 75 crore was collected from just 90 properties in missing tax, according to civic officials’ estimates.
Since 2018, Indian cities have committed over Rs 500 crore to building 10 digital twins. Genesys holds eight of these city contracts—including Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Varanasi, and the ever-flooding Pune.
And Pune is not the only city using it to curb tax evasion. Mumbai’s Rs 155-crore twin too is being plugged first into property tax, building approvals, and estate management.
Credits
India built digital twins of cities to predict floods. It’s now using them to find tax evaders
Mrunmayee Kulkarni
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