Look at it this way, in a city like Mumbai; parking spaces are being sold at around `15-`20-lakhs each. Car ownership and vehicular traffic is increasing rapidly by the day and parking vehicles is becoming a key concern for anyone owning one. Provision for adequate car parking faciliFocus. indd 68 24/05/2018 1:17:56 AM MAY 2018|EPC&I|69ties is mandatory as per laws for any construction approvals in many metros now. This country, therefore, needs viable parking solutions to decongest roads, residential and commercial complexes and we want to be an active participant in achieving this.

That would be about `2000-cr by 2022. It is a recessionary industry at the moment, so the pie is huge, and only a fraction of it has been targeted as of now. The industry is growing at a good 25-30 per cent per annum. Presently, I would estimate the industry to be close to `900-cr. And, these are official figures.

There is no centralised data. Most of the players in these industries are closely held companies. There is no published data available and, nobody shares data. So, my estimation today is that Klaus, Wohr, are doing a turnover of approximately `120- `130-crores each. RR Parkon is doing about `100-cr, again estimating. There are also other manufacturers who are doing about `70-`80-crores per annum. So, overall, the size of the industry is roughly about `900-crores.

I say that because projects are not taking off as they should at the moment. Parking solution is the last priority for any developer in a given project. Parking comes in only once you have tenants moving in, or the owners moving in. Only then there is a need to provide parking. Or else, you need an Occupation Certificate (OC), and parking is part of that OC. Think about it, parking solutions come even below the consideration for an elevator.

If the project is on hold or delayed for some reason, the developer will keep your order for a parking solution on hold. It is only when the developer of a project is sure about beginning of the sale of the project, that he initiates placing order for the manufacturing of parking solutions.

Yes, a little over 3 months.

Yes, all of it is procured locally. Even the critical core components are manufactured locally by global giants, and we procure these from them. We use the best brands available as quality remains a top priority for us. For instance, we procure the PLC from Mitsubishi, a leading worldwide manufacturer. However, we only deal with Mitsubishi in India, nothing is imported. Similarly, steel is procured from major Indian manufacturing companies like Jindal, Tata and Essar.

There are many who do that. They import these systems from China, assemble them locally and sell them to customers. But, we didn’t want to do that. The primary reason is that we are not sure that we will get the right product, and the right quality that we are looking for.

Unless we know what we have done, we cannot guarantee a life of 25 years for our product, as we do at Tedra.
It is important to know what one has actually done with ones product. The technology that has gone into it, the quality of steel that has been procured, the thickness of steel being used, safety equipment like sensors, bearings, controllers, motors, etc., and whether it will last the customer five years, 10 years or 25, considering local conditions in India.
On the other hand, when one imports from China, one gets a CKD and one is selling what has been imported. You will be surprised to know that we have been contacted by quite a few users who have imported these solutions from countries like Korea and China, who are now asking for our assistance to repair them. They are regretting their decision because they cannot find any suitable service outfits locally. We are trying to change the software, hardware, even both in some cases, to re-integrate their systems.
Some companies and their representatives in India have no long-term arrangement or commitments to the Indian market as they just want to sell. What we have come to realise is that there are many Chinese manufacturers coming into the Indian market, and suddenly, after 3-4 years, a majority of them close shop, or just vanish after selling their systems. Then, one finds 10 more players have entered the market.
So, clearly, these fly-by-night operators do not maintain an association with the project. There is no relationship between the manufacturer/supplier and the customer. And, unless such a commitment exists, there will be no customer confidence and market cannot grow.
That is why whatever we do, we do it in-house. We source our products locally, we learn the new technologies
that are being offered globally, get the ideas and put them down, tweak them to suit the Indian market. Then, after thoroughly testing them at our plant, we offer these to the Indian market.
If, in our search for new technologies, we find an interesting design, we negotiate with the manufacturer or owners, pay for the design and bring it to India. We also visit exhibitions and attend seminars on global trends in parking. All our learning is put into a practical shape in our plant through extensive R & D efforts.

Yes. All these designs are in-house. All of these designs have been conceived by my core team of engineers and designers with more than 20 years of experience in the car parking businesses. Our company has an incredibly knowledgeable team working on the development of products.
As some components are vended out, we have developed a very good vendor base supplying us quality materials. They are aware that we don’t compromise on the material that we use on our solutions for manufacturing and we take great interest in their technical and quality processes.

I won’t say that these are copies. By that logic, all cars would be copies of each other. It requires a huge amount of innovation, technical expertise and knowledge of local conditions and regulations to develop a product that would run successfully here in India, a product that stands out among others and makes a difference.

Yes, that is how we want to evolve this company. I would like to say that we are parking consultants and advisors first and parking solution manufacturers later. Our core strategy is to get involved with the customer at the initial stage itself so that the developer can plan the parking along with the rest of the project, rather than consider parking as an afterthought when he encounters a problem.
We would like to work as advisors of car parking systems, and not just as suppliers of car parking systems. We will provide apt solutions, for sure.
Considering that the market is currently in a recessionary trend, as you say, would existing constructed buildings such as hospitals, or office complexes, or even affordable housing, which is doing good, which have not planned for such high volume of vehicular traffic in the complex be your main market, rather than planned and upcoming projects?
One can do little with existing spaces. Say, for instance, there is a hospital which has already come up. And, let us assume they have a basement which is of only 3.0 metres high. That is what the developer thought would suffice when he planned the project and constructed accordingly. So, in three metres, I cannot accommodate two cars. I need a minimum of 3.8 metres to accommodate two cars so that I can at least double his parking capacity.
Typically, if you were to think of construction, between 3 metres and 3.8 metres, the cost of construction wouldn’t go up at all. It would hardly matter to the developer. But, you are providing space for two cars.
If, on the other hand, he has not planned anything, I cannot provide him with a viable solution. I will probably look out for some space available somewhere in the compound and suggest some solution to him. In such a situation, I am not customising my solutions to his needs, I am giving him a product from the lot that we have.
For large parking, for planned Focus.indd 70 24/05/2018 1:18:33 AM
MAY 2018|EPC&I|71parking, you have to sit with the developer, understand his project and give him a suitable solution.

I realise what you are getting at. Let me give you an example. In a city like Mumbai, I have a customer in South Mumbai who has requested for Tower Parking for his office complex. I would not get such an order from New Mumbai. Orders for Stack Parking will come from New Mumbai, while South Mumbai doesn’t have space; they have to invariable settle for tower parking.
We have inquiries for 20-25 towers for this South Mumbai office space, which we are currently discussing and, none for New Mumbai. Delhi, for instance, despite its dense population, would opt for stack parking. And, that is because land is still available.

There have been quite a few tenders that have been floated, since the government, as part of their smart city agenda, has become a large buyer for such solutions now. We have bid for Nasik, which is coming up as a smart city. We have also bid for Belgavi.
My personal experience is that the government has still not understood the parking issue. They typically want us to go under the BOT model. This cannot operate on a BOT model because we are seeking revenues from the public and, nobody is going to pay us enough money to park his car in the mechanised parking system.
At the cost structure that the government is planning, it would probably take at least another 100 years to recover the cost. So, I think that model is failing, and the government too is realising that it is not working.
We did manufacture parking systems for a project at Nagpur, Nagpur Improvement Trust: a corporation for development of Nagpur City. They had a better idea. They leased out a piece of land to a builder who constructed a hotel and, in turn, he was asked to provide a public parking space by the authorities as in a tower parking system to facilitate public parking in the area. This builder sourced the tower parking and we manufactured the same for NIT for 70 plus cars. The parking was provided to facilitate public, and that man makes his money developing his commercial space and running that hotel for the next however many years that he does.

This is the only way that it would become viable. Otherwise, people won’t be interested in running business for public parking.

We had offers from Ahmadabad, but that is on a BOT model. And, we are not interested in that. Actually, we are not interested in handling government business to a very large extent. That is not our forte. So, consciously we have decided to maintain that portfolio to 15 per cent of the total business.
Conducting business with government agencies is not a cake walk, in terms of payments, getting stuck as prioritise keep shifting, projects getting delayed for approval and multi agency involvements, the local politics, etc. So, we decided that as we are growing, it would augur well if we confined the business to about 15 per cent of our total exposure.
As I said before, we bid for Belagavi, Nasik, a few projects in Delhi. We are very choosy about the projects that we pick.

As I said before, I am not projecting myself as a parking systems manufacturer. I am projecting myself as a parking consultant and advisor, advising on solutions that can help optimise parking in limited space. When I discuss with my customer, at the initiation of the project, I advise him, without charging any fee.
That means, every month, we are visiting almost 80-90 customers who have projects in their inception stage, some even in conception stage. We tell them what exactly needs to be done in terms of parking solutions. And, our experience has been that out of these 80-90 customers that we visit, at least 40 are going to come back to us. And, out of those 40, at least 25-30 will end up buying our solutions.

That is our experience as well. We are building on the relationship right from the inception. That is the primary differentiating factor while dealing with customers.
Secondly, our systems, as I mentioned before, are totally made in India. We give you a technology that is global, available in India, made at the Pune plant. We guarantee that this product will function without any trouble whatsoever for the next 25 years. I have a service team fully backed up and a commitment to provide you a life-long hassle free parking service. Today, we are covering Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Pune. And, in the next couple of months, we will be moving into Delhi as well.
The infrastructure starts with appointing a sales team. We follow this up immediately by appointing a service team, so that I have at least 4-5 experienced personnel at a given location who know what is to be done if anything were to go wrong with the equipment.
If an order comes within 15 days, I have the capabilities of executing it immediately. And, that is how we differentiate ourselves from others.

We have about 10 people in Mumbai, Focus.indd 71 24/05/2018 1:18:34 AM 72 |EPC&I|MAY 2018
FOCUS-PARKING SYSTEMS
out of which three are in marketing and the rest are distributed into service and installations. We have benchmarks. There are categories of breakdowns. If the breakdown is minor, we will sort it out within an hour or two. If it is a major breakdown, our service engineers have been instructed to sort it out within six hours. And, if there is a shutdown, total breakdown of the system, then we inform the client that we will service it anywhere between 24 to 48 hours.

In Bengaluru, we have six people presently. In Pune, we have four people with sales and service, but then, you have the entire manufacturing unit here in Pune. Delhi, for us, is the next big market. We don’t yet have much experience in the north of the country. We are a bit cautious at the moment about how do we approach the market.

At present, this is the place that I would like to operate from. We can manufacture around 4500 to 5000 pallets in a year. If you multiply 5000 pallets by an average of `2.0-lakhs, that would be a good turnover per annum. That is the projection we are looking at for in the initial two years.
If we have to expand, we will. My first priority will always be to bring things under control. We don’t want quality to be monitored somewhere else, procurement to be done from elsewhere.
For a manufacturing set up, centralisation is very important. Unless the volumes in the north market and other parts would justify a new manufacturing set up, we don’t plan on moving. We are totally focussed on manufacturing these systems centrally, closely monitored. We can then ensure that the quality of our systems is best in the industry. Competing with the big players and matching up to them is a challenge.
Our goal is to be the third biggest player in this market by 2022. We are

We think the maximum demand is going to come from Stacks. Stacks, going ahead, will be akin to a consumer product. It will be the one that will be sold in large volumes. Then, also, it is the most competitive.
But, the higher we go, the better it gets. If I am selling Rotary, or Tower, or Cart systems, the technology gets better. My focus would be confined to the high-end solutions. That should ideally be of about 70 per cent of our business.

As I mentioned to you earlier, I have around 20 prospective parking towers in South Mumbai. Volumes are not really low. Comparatively, Stack volumes are high, because somebody who is doing an office complex will demand 700 stacks because he wants to park 1500 cars. Someone who is doing an export-oriented business will need 3000 stacks or some figure like that.
The volumes are really large there, but it is highly competitive and the margins are very low. Stack is not that exciting. Anybody can make it. It is not a technologically challenging solution. In short, it is not a challenge.
In my opinion, around 40 per cent
confident of achieving our goals. We made a business plan of achieving `90-cr for the current Financial Year, and we have already achieved `10-cr in April this year.

That would depend on the kind of work pressure and delivery schedules that one has. If volume increases, we work on two shifts. Normally, we work in a single shift.
Focus.indd 72 24/05/2018 1:18:47 AM
MAY 2018|EPC&I|73of the business will go to the low-end systems while 60 per cent of the business will come from the high-end Towers, Rotary, Carts, etc. And, I foresee Tedra being a leader in the Rotary parking system category. By the end of the year, we will have the largest number of Rotary’s in the country.

Yes. The bigger players haven’t gone in that direction. We have taken up that challenge, with a perfect product to offer.

There are three stages to that. Once the procured material comes in, we have an inspection team that thoroughly checks for any inconsistencies in terms of thickness, paint quality, hardness of the material, etc. Our suppliers have to submit test reports for the material supplied.
Then, there is an online check. Whatever material goes online, it is continuously monitored.
Finally, before we send the system out into the market, we conduct a thorough check once again. And, if at any stage, it doesn’t meet our quality standards, it will be torn apart. There is absolutely no compromise on quality.

Yes, we are. As I said, we are into conveyers and industrial lifts, and our concept of designs for car parking has come from the Robotics set up. There are lot of other things which we use, especially on the programming front. For instance, how we want to programme and control our parking systems comes from our robotics experience.

Telematics is not rocket science. What is telematics? You are interacting with a system. You are interacting with a card. The concept is very clear. It can be implemented. Today, you can have an access card. If you want, you can call your car from your Smartphone. It is not high technology.
Access cards are something that we already offer, if a customer wants. So, if somebody has a designated parking slot, the person can just swipe the card and his/her car will come.
On diagnostics, when you see the pattern of behaviour in your controller, which is the brain of your parking system, you can read the system errors.
Here, many parts are mechanical. If there is a tear in the rope, it has to be physically seen. You cannot do it online. If the bearing of the motor is gone or the motor is noisy, you have to physically see it. You cannot do it online. So, physical observation and inspection is necessary.

One, my competitors are very strong in terms of financial strength, presence and backgrounds. Comparatively, we are still babies but, we are determined. We are confident that we will make it to the top. The market is big, and that offers us a huge opportunity to grow.
Then, you also have the prices of steel that keep fluctuating and technology that needs a constant upgrade.
What are the disruptions that you see in your industry?
I think the biggest disruptor is the government. Policies keep changing. Luckily, in the last few years, policies have been very encouraging for the parking solutions segment. Now, for any project that you do, you have to first plan for the parking as well. I think the government has to include parking as part of FSI across all major metros. Then, developers will be forced to provide proper parking for the tenants.
Public parking also has to undergo a sea change and this will happen only when automated parking solutions are made available.

There are certain products which almost anybody can manufacture. And, there are many run-of-the-mill players who will provide cheaper parking solutions. We have to compete with them. There are quite a few players in the unorganised sector who make Stacks. And, we are competing against them. It does impact our margins.
That is the reason why I said earlier that I would go in for a high-end product rather than be married to a low-end product. If you have a good customer, he will never buy it from these fly-by-night manufacturers. At the end of the day, it is the quality and the brand that triumph.

As I said earlier, we took a conscious decision to honour whatever old contracts that we still have. But, we will not take any more fresh business from them. We will neither lend our designs nor borrow theirs.
Are there any new verticals that you plan to enter going ahead?
We have a vision to be a total integrated parking solutions company. That is the thought process. Right from ticketing process, boom barriers, computerisation/GPS tracking of parking lots, CCTVs, to fully automated high volume parking lots. We want to be there in all known and recognised as a company that facilities and makes the parking process a pleasure.

Yes, it does. We are already working on a product for 2-wheelers.

I have `10.5-cr worth of orders in hand currently and we are in the first month of financial year. We have around `25-cr worth of orders which are in process, which I hope we close by the first quarter.

Traffic in cities is getting denser by the day. It is estimated that, in the next decade, the population in urban areas is expected to grow roughly to about 70 per cent. Population growth is not only a pressing issue for the government but a tangible daily reality for most citizens.
The biggest problem of urban commute is the non-availability of parking areas since our cars move only about 5.0 per cent in a given day and parked for the rest.

The automotive industry is racing ahead at a considerable speed. As society begins to embrace the benefits of electrical energy in driving, driverless cars, artificial intelligence, other elements of the automotive industry take similar turns towards efficiency and brilliance. As this evolution continues, the logistics of parking too comes into question. Here are some of the parking innovations that will transform Car Parking space in the immediate future:

In the last few years, we have seen the development of semi and fully automated parking lots. However, Automated and Mechanised parking has been around for many years, though it has developed by leaps and bounds in the past few years. From simple stackers, we have seen Indian Metros using car parking Towers, Carts, Rotary and Puzzle Systems that facilitate parking of
many cars within a limited footprint/ space at one location. The one element that has been
holding back this sector is the waiting time. Sure, you don’t have to spend
time scouting for a suitable space.
on the other hand, you do have to wait several minutes for the machine to load your car. This problem, however, is soon to be relegated to a bygone era. Parking innovations are in progress
that can have the capacity of storing large numbers of cars at one go. At its peak, the system will take only two minutes between ticket and loading. This is less than half the time for a
mechanised system and four times faster than the average waiting time for a traditional parking. What makes it even more interesting is that automated parking spaces can fit 40 to 60 per cent more cars in the same volume of space. The systems have the ability to measure the height of the car and place it in a suitable level of the car park without the need for human access.

This technology will function with electro- magnetic charging pads. Initially, MARCH 2020|EPC&I|55 they will appear in home garages, but soon, we could see wireless charging facilities integrated into roads. That’s right! Charging on-the-go! Rather than a two-hour park and charge, cars would rarely need to stop for the sake of charging. The vision is that
wireless charging for electric vehicles will be as accessible and widespread as Wi-Fi is today. It is already being piloted by some community bus systems. This technology could potentially overcome the current issues of plug-in charging infrastructure that is holding
us back from mass adoption. Electric vehicle drivers will be able to charge their batteries as they go about their daily business; parking on charging pads in parking spots, and what not.

The parking innovation of self-parking cars will allow a much more efficient use of available space. It will allow vehicle owners to pull over at curb and with the press of a button, let the vehicle go and find a parking spot to park, and call it back when it is time to go. It
is like your ride ends when you get off. Thus, a new generation of parking infrastructure can take place. Whilst we don’t know exactly what it will look like, we know that it will take up a fraction of the space which it takes up today. To get into specifics, the average space required for a car in a traditional parking garage is about 30 square meters. This includes, for instance, the ramps that connect the different levels. So, the space needed for 100 cars
would be equal to 3,000 square meters of concrete. With self-parking cars, up to 30 per cent of that space could be saved. When you consider how much of our city scape is taken up by parking, it hints at just how much it could change the face of our cities. The architecture will
transform by becoming smaller and more cost-effective.

After our phones and homes getting ‘smarter’, many companies are now innovating with smart car parking solutions. Innovative and perfect parking solutions are the first and important step in the right direction. Many cities, such as Beijing, Los Angeles, Dubai, San Francisco, and
New York are piloting new and trending parking solutions. These smart car park systems work on low-power sensors and smart meters to track the occupancy or availability of parking spots. It is an IoT-based device that gives you a signal about the availability of parking spaces by indicating the spaces that are free and the ones occupied. The IoT devices are fixed on each
parking slot from where it sends a signal to a nearby receiver which, in turn, gives you a continuous live update about the availability of all the slots. The collected data will be used to broadcast parking information to a parking guidance system and smartphone
app for drivers. Besides the location of the parking space, drivers will get information like
the size of the parking space and even nearby public transportation information if the suggestion is needed. So, gone are the days of roaming around the block. Parking problems are not uncommon, especially for big cities. By 2025, market spending for smart parking products and services is expected to grow substantially. That is good news because it will force people to try to find a solution to these traffic problems instead of taking no action.

New technologies from solar farms to electric cars, drones for delivery and driver less taxis will mark some pathbreaking changes into our modern cities in the very near future. For a generation that will always be on the move the most important change will be the revolution in the urban transportation and its worst nightmare today i.e. Car Parking.
We are all aware that cars are moving only 5% of the time to commute and are parked for the remaining 95% and therefore when not in use whether at home, office, hospital, roadside, shopping plaza, city centre or college we need to provide for their parking.
At 32 mts. /car that are required ideally to park a vehicle this is probably the most pinching and expensive use of a real estate in urban India. Compounded by a lack of policy and space in our cities it surely has made urban living and commuting chaotic and nightmarish.
Parking policies of present and past governments have been lax and lacking in vision. In cities today where vehicle population is almost running hand in hand with the human population for example Delhi has a vehicle population of around 90 lacs and no parking policy for public parking. The result is for all of us to see, our Capital City is among the most polluted cities in the world and even short distances are tough to commute if not impossible. This is becoming true of our all major cities be it Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune or Kolkata.
Health of a city, liveability, how a city feels, looks, how its residents move, how the traffic flows, how much time do they spend commuting, how much pollution is generated is solely decided by how a state manages its traffic and therefore parking.
Even as I write this, across the country 85%-90% of Public Parking happens in narrow lanes, roadside, streetspots, corners, footpaths, by lanes and anywhere. Majority of this happens free of cost or at very low costs thus in a way subsidizing use of private vehicles and chaos. People at any time prefer to drive rather than cycle, walk or take public transport if available.
There is a dire need to have a proper policy framework for management of our cities especially developing of a Parking Policy and management. We must curb the free for all, anywhere and everywhere approach and reduce the area given for parking. Designated parking areas, parking duration policy, pricing of parking to generate revenues for better facilities and discourage long hours, ownership of multiple vehicles, encouraging car pools to work. Police and the traffic management authorities are the frontlines in traffic laws. They should be mandated to enforce the rules and regulations binding the vehicular traffic operations without any fear or favour.

New automated car parking systems can offer large parking facilities using height, depth and width intelligently to provide customised needs for public car parking. Some of these facilities are working effectively in large modern cities like Tokyo and New York.

The use of computers and other information technological tools like communication gadgets and radar for traffic monitoring are highly relevant for solving complex issues relating to parking problem and traffic management.
Cities should have an areawise parking Plan with a thorough understanding of the supply and demand, peak and non- peak traffic situations. Policy makers and private professional parking operators can come together and play a great role in easing this problem with successful business models encouraging organised parking and commute.
With modern day technologies stacking up and use vertical heights to park and retrieve vehicle is convenient and possible. New automated car parking systems can offer large parking facilities using height, depth and width intelligently to provide customised needs for public car parking. Some of these facilities are working effectively in large modern cities like Tokyo and New York. Private builders in India are also adapting this technology to resolve their parking woes. Government should have a clear-cut policy guideline on public automated parking systems as it involves large capital outlay and its economics do not work under a typical government run BOLT programme as in infrastructure.

My own estimates are this is a market of about Rs 500-600 crore annually. There is no centralised or published data available on parking systems. Most of the players are closely held companies. To the best of my knowledge, companies in the organised sector like Wohr Parking Systems, Klaus, RR Parkon, Tedra, and PARI, among a couple of others, have a market share of about 60%, amounting to about Rs350 crore. The balance is shared by small and unorganised players.

Actually, parking systems have nothing to do with shapes. It has more to do with parking requirementsof a project. Keeping specific constraints in mind, a design and a system is subsequently suggested. What we provide is a customised solution, considering all variables like available space, costs, and the regulatory framework involved. We work closely with our customers and create the space from whatever small areas available by using height, width and depth intelligently. Our range starts from a simple stacker that can immediately double a parking capacity,toa puzzle park that can go up to seven levels vertically, a mini rotary system that works like a merry-go-round and can park 14 cars in a space meant for just two! Then, there’s the tower park that can park up to 70 cars vertically in a space meant for three cars and a cart system that can park anywhere between 100-1000 cars. Our designs are robust and tested and similar systems can be seen running in Japan,US, Korea, China and other advanced countries.

Urbanisation at a rapid pace and rising aspirations of the middle-class has led to an unprecedented growth in the use of private automobiles. This is a problem further compounded with lack of public transport facilities and poor traffic management policies.This has further led to an acute shortage of parking spaces in most of India’s large urban centreslike Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune. In Mumbai, parking spaces are being sold at Rs15 to Rs 20 lakhs at primelocations. Parking a vehicle is a key concern today. The biggest user of automated car parking are actually new constructions where a car parking facility is mandatory as per the building guidelines laid down by respective corporations. Here, we plan for solutions at the inception stage along with the developer. The second large segment are existing buildings that seek enhancement in the numbers of car parking spaces. Here, we have to plan parking systems as per the area available for use. Another large emerging segment is public parking facilities with initiatives being taken by urban local bodies to create automated multi-parking facilities for the general public.

Land is a very scarce resource, especially in large cities. At 32 mt/car that is ideally required to park a vehicle, this is probably the most pinching and expensive use of real estate in urban India. Therefore, the answer to this is vertical parking and use of automation. Once the capital cost of equipment is taken care of, it costs anything between just Rs 400 for a simple solution to a maximum of Rs 900 per month for a high-end parking solution, to maintain the system. Cost advantages and other benefits, therefore, over a conventional parking system, are tremendous. Anybody buying a system from us will remain engaged with us for the lifetime of the system which is between 20-25 years. Our company has a strong team, committed to provide maintenance service 24/7 to the customer. The biggest demand can perhaps come from the municipality and civic authorities if they decide to construct parking solutions for the general public. Comment. Parking policies of present and past governments are, and have been lax and lacking in vision. In cities today, the vehicle population is running almost hand-in-hand with the human population. For instance, Delhi has a vehicle population of around 90 lakhs but no parking policy for public parking! The result is there to see. Our capital city is among the most polluted cities in the world and even short distances are tough to commute, if not impossible. This is becoming true of all our major cities, be it Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune or Kolkata. The health of a city, liveability, how a city feels, looks, how its residents move, the traffic-flow, how much time do they spend commuting and the pollution generated is solely decided by how a sate manages its traffic, and therefore parking. Even as I write this, across the country, 85- 90% of public parking is happening in narrow lanes, roadsides, street spots, corners, footpaths, by-lanes and anywhere else you can think of! The majority of this happens free of cost or at very low costs, in a way subsidising the use of private vehicles and chaos. People at any time prefer to drive rather than cycle, walk or take the public transport, even if available.There is a dire need to have a proper policy framework for management of our cities, especially developing a parking policy and management. We must curb the free-for-all, anywhere and everywhere approach and reduce the area given for parking. I advocate steps such as formulating a policy for designated parking areas, parking duration, pricing of parking to generate revenues for better facilities and discourage long hours, ownership of multiple vehicles and encouraging car pools to work. Police and the traffic management authorities are the frontlines in traffic laws. They should be mandated to enforce rules binding on vehicular traffic without any fear or favour. We should introduce information technology and technological tools like communication gadgets and radar for traffic monitoring. These are highly relevant for solving complex issues relating to parking problems and traffic management. Cities should adopt an area-wise parking plan with a thorough understanding of the supply and demand, peak and non-peak traffic situations.