Chapter 9: Navigating Urban Resilience: Analysing the Policies for Sustainable Digitalization of Guwahati, India

Abstract

Climate change has led to adverse effects in Guwahati, a smart city and the largest city of NorthEast India, resulting into artificial flood, uneven raining, and increased temperature rise. Moreover, recently, the entire Guwahati city has been flooded and huge inconvenience was caused to the city dwellers due to unplanned and illegal anthropogenic constructions across the city that further reduces its adaptability to such adverse effects of climate change. Sustainable digitalization is therefore expected as a solution to enhance urban resilience at the contemporary times in adapting to climate change and mitigating the effects of unplanned anthropogenic interventions since empirical studies have highlighted positive links between digital economy and urban economy resilience. Guwahati, being a developing city which is adversely affected, demands increasing investment in policies and technologies for digitalization. However, such investments are found lacking in the policy discourse due to lack of investments in modern technologies during the study and thus there is a need for addressing such a gap and make the local residents accustomed to such technologies for increasing urban resilience.

Keywords: Climate Change, Digitalization, Guwahati, Sustainable Policies, Technological Innovations, Unauthorized Constructions