Inside Kochi's Smart City Command Centre in Kaloor

On the 4th floor of the JLN Metro Station building in Kaloor sits a room most people who pass underneath it every day have never heard of: Kochi's Integrated Command, Control and Communication Centre, known as IC4, inaugurated on 8 June 2020 by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan over video link. Its main video wall alone runs to 391 square feet, 27 screens of 70 inches each arranged nine across and three down, backed by a second 116 square foot wall of eight more 70-inch screens, and it is billed as India's first such centre deployed entirely on the cloud.

• What is Kochi's Integrated Command and Control Centre?
• Where is Kochi's smart city command centre located?
• What does the command centre actually monitor?
• Is this the same as SmartCity Kochi in Kakkanad?

What is Kochi's Integrated Command and Control Centre?

IC4 is Kochi's answer to a problem every fast-growing Indian city runs into: city government splits across departments, police, fire, water, electricity, waste, traffic, each with its own systems and its own control room, none of them talking to each other during an actual emergency. IC4 was built to be the single room where all of that comes together, described in its own launch materials as the brain for city operation, incident handling and disaster management, and meant to process the data those departments generate into something a planner can actually use rather than leaving it scattered across separate offices.

Where is Kochi's smart city command centre located?

The centre is operated by Cochin Smart Mission Limited, the special purpose company set up to run Kochi's Smart Cities Mission projects, out of the 4th floor of the JLN Metro Station building in Kaloor. Kochi was among the first 20 Indian cities picked under the central government's Smart Cities Mission, and IC4 is the physical, staffed control room that mission produced here, not a website or a dashboard but an actual room with a video wall built by Delta running around the clock. Anyone who has taken the metro through Kaloor station has walked directly beneath it without knowing.

What does the command centre actually monitor?

The video wall pulls together CCTV feeds from public locations across the city, coordinates with police, fire and rescue services during an incident, and tracks the operation of the city's energy-efficient LED streetlighting network. During the COVID-19 pandemic it was repurposed as a dedicated war room for tracking the outbreak locally, an example of the kind of role its designers had in mind: not a single-purpose traffic camera feed but a room that can be pointed at whatever the city's most urgent problem happens to be that week. It is meant to catch anomalies and event alerts as they happen rather than have each department discover a problem separately and late. That sounds more impressive on paper than it always is in practice; a command centre is only as useful as the sensors and camera feeds actually wired into it, and stitching together decades-old departmental systems into one live feed is the slow, unglamorous part of the job that a launch event does not show.

Is this the same as SmartCity Kochi in Kakkanad?

No, and the two get mixed up constantly because they share half a name. SmartCity Kochi is the Dubai-backed IT park and special economic zone campus out in Kakkanad, built to house technology and media companies, entirely separate from municipal government. IC4 is a civic control room run by Cochin Smart Mission Limited under Kochi's Smart Cities Mission, with no connection to the Kakkanad IT campus beyond both projects using the word smart. If you are researching office space or company listings, our Kakkanad IT-life guide and the CSEZ explainer cover that campus specifically; IC4 belongs with the rest of the city's civic and emergency infrastructure, alongside things like the 1930 cyber-fraud helpline rather than with Kakkanad's office parks. More on how the city's tech and civic projects fit together is in our tech section.