The Smart Community Award is an award given to communities that have successfully achieved Smart City status.
There are five tiers of awards, diamond, platinum, gold, silver and bronze. The top tier diamond recipient receives a cash prize worth RM 10,000, while fifth tier bronze receives RM3,000.
Smart City is a designation given when a city incorporates information and communication technologies to enhance the quality and performance of urban services such as energy, transportation and utilities to reduce resource consumption, wastage and overall costs.
The smart city project in Kuching is underway, with the implementation of smart technology such as smart traffic light systems, e-wallet, and smart housing.
The smart traffic light system aims to reduce overall travel time by 30% by 2022, with further plans to consolidate CCTV monitoring and street traffic under the Sarawak Integrated Operation Centre.
Sarawak Pay is a state-exclusive online identity, which allows transactions to be made through the application.
In November 2019, Sarawak Pay was used by over 10,000 merchants and 150,000 consumers and had completed transactions worth over RM100 million.
The Darul Hana Development in Kuching started in 2017, is a relocation project of 12 villages along the Sarawak River to improve the villagers’ living standards.
As it is a pilot project for building a smart township from the ground up, it will be equipped with 5G connectivity, flood mitigation system and a centralised septic tank.
Smart cities require close cooperation with local council communities in order to implement technology that works for the specific needs of the people.
Building smart cities will ultimately improve the quality of life of the people, but it is important to also include the rural community to ensure they do not get left out in the process of modernisation.
Smart city technology is also being implemented in Miri, Sarawak’s second largest city with nine programmes being rolled out.
The programmes include infrastructural solutions, such as digital signage and smart drain while software and system solutions include smart bus and smart tourism.
The digital innovation solutions implemented in Sarawak have qualified the Sarawak Multimedia Authority (SMA) for the final round of the World Smart City Awards 2020 under the COVID-19 Innovation Awards category.
Smart cities are for improving the citizens’ quality of life through technology, and at the same time, elevating Sarawak on the level of other large cities in the country.
