As Indian cities face growing parking congestion and limited urban space, efficient utilisation of existing parking infrastructure is becoming increasingly important. In this interaction with Machine Edge Global, Amrit Choudhury, Founder and CEO of ParkoBot, discusses the challenges of fragmented parking, the role of IoT and digital technology, monetisation of private parking spaces, and how parking can evolve as a key component of India’s future mobility ecosystem.
What are the most significant structural barriers to efficient parking utilization in dense Indian cities today?
I don’t think India’s parking problem is simply a shortage of parking. A major part of the problem is that the parking capacity we already have is not being utilised efficiently.
We can see this across major cities and some of the most busy areas. For example, In Bangalore, areas like Kormangla, HSR, drivers spend long frustrating hours searching for a parking spot and at the same time, there are unused spaces inside commercial offices, IT Parks, residential properties. The story is the same with Mumbai, which is anyway restrained with land availability due to its majestic coastal line. Kolkata has a similar issue in busy commercial areas where road space is already under pressure.
The fundamental problem is fragmentation. One parking space may belong to an apartment owner, another to an office, another to a hotel or mall. There is often no common system through which a driver can know whether a space is available, whether it can be legitimately used, and how access will be managed.
There is also an enforcement challenge. Listing a parking spot on an app is just the start, it doesn’t ensure that the booked parking is used by the correct person, thus parking technology needs to move beyond discovery and become a digitally manageable asset.
What technical and operational challenges arise when deploying IoT-enabled access control systems at the individual parking-slot level?
Given India’s tropical climate, one of the biggest challenge is to maintain every device which is exposed to the climate.
A conventional gate system is relatively easy to protect and maintain. A device installed directly in a parking slot has to deal with dust, water, flooding in basements, vehicles driving over it, accidental damage, poor connectivity and sometimes deliberate misuse. Indian parking environments can be particularly demanding.
Therefore, the hardware has to be designed for these conditions from the beginning. You cannot simply develop something in a laboratory and expect it to operate reliably for years without considering monsoons, flooding, dust and everyday misuse.
With Parkobot, core engineering activities such as PCB design, sensor calibration and prototyping are kept in-house. Manufacturing can be scaled through partners, but control over the aspects that directly affect reliability and product performance remains important.
There is also an operational reality: technology can fail. Sensors can malfunction, connectivity can go down and devices can be damaged. A reliable parking system therefore needs an operating process behind the technology. The system should provide visibility into vehicle movement, parking duration and collections through an online dashboard, while operational teams support the physical environment.
Ultimately, the challenge is not merely connecting a parking barrier to the internet. It is ensuring that physical devices continue to perform reliably at scale in actual parking environments.
What factors determine whether private parking owners are willing to open their spaces to short-term or hourly rental?
For most owners, the concern is whether they will remain in control of their parking space. A parking space is a personal or an institutional asset. Someone who owns a residential slot, or has been allotted one by an office or society, wants to know who is using it and when. They do not want strangers accessing their premises without adequate control.
The second factor is financial benefit. If a parking space remains unused for eight or ten hours a day, the owner may be willing to generate additional income from it, particularly in cities where parking is expensive and difficult to find.
The third factor is convenience. If an owner has to coordinate with the incoming drivers, security at the entrance or guide them to the exact parking spot, they are likely to not list their parking assets.
Technology can remove much of that friction. An owner can make a space available for a defined period while access and payment are managed digitally.
However, not every private parking space needs to become public parking. An owner may want to monetise the space only during working hours, while travelling, or during another period when it is genuinely idle.
The opportunity is to allow owners to monetise unused parking time without giving up control of the underlying asset.
What policy or regulatory changes would most accelerate the formalization and digitization of private parking inventory?
I think we first need to recognise private parking as part of a city’s mobility infrastructure.
A significant amount of parking capacity exists inside private buildings, offices, malls, hotels and residential properties. If even a portion of this capacity can be brought into a formal system, it can reduce pressure on public roads.
There should be clearer rules around shared private parking, particularly concerning permissions, taxation, liability, insurance and access. Owners need confidence that they can legally and safely monetise unused capacity.
The second requirement is a common digital framework for parking inventory. This does not necessarily mean that the government should own or operate private spaces. It could simply provide a recognised framework for identifying and digitising available parking capacity with the owner’s consent.
The government and even local administrations can design a city level parking policy just like they have done with EV charging, public transport and broader urban mobility planning. Private players’ participation to organise and manage unused parking assets should be incentivized and encouraged.
With the help of technology and data from usage, cities can overtime understand their parking needs, demand patterns and how best to utilise the existing capacity in the most efficient manner.
That information can eventually support better decisions around pricing, infrastructure and road-space allocation.
The objective should be straightforward: make legitimate parking capacity easier to identify, access and manage.
What lessons can be drawn from global smart parking or curb-management initiatives that are relevant to India?
The biggest lesson is that parking is no longer simply a place to leave a vehicle. It is becoming part of how cities manage mobility.
Cities globally have experimented with digital permits, dynamic pricing, occupancy sensors, reservations and different approaches to curb management. India can learn from these experiences, but we should not simply copy another country’s model.
Indian cities are highly diverse. Even within the same city, an organised commercial district can exist alongside a highly informal parking environment.
The underlying principle is what matters: parking should be measurable, discoverable and manageable. The technology used to achieve that should be adapted to the realities of each location.
Does digitising parking automatically solve the parking problem?
No, it is just the starting point.
The physical and digital layers have to work together. You need booking, payment and software capabilities, but in many situations you also need physical access control to ensure that the booking can actually be enforced.
There is another important Indian consideration: a substantial part of parking remains informal. People cannot be expected to move overnight from informal systems to complicated digital processes.
The technology therefore has to be simple for the driver, parking operator and property owner.
How do you expect parking infrastructure to evolve as autonomous vehicles, micromobility and shared mobility become more prevalent?
Just like new ways of mobility enter our lives, parking infrastructure will also form a large part of mobility infrastructure overall.
EVs are probably the most immediate change. A vehicle already spends a certain amount of time sitting in a parking space. That same period can potentially be used for charging. Parking and charging can therefore naturally converge.
That is also the thinking behind the “Park Karo Ya Charge Karo” approach: parking infrastructure can eventually become part of a distributed charging network rather than being used only for parking.
Shared mobility will change the role of parking as well. Facilities may increasingly serve as staging points, charging locations and pick-up or drop-off points rather than simply long-term parking spaces.
Autonomous vehicles could take this further. In the Indian context, adoption may take longer, but eventually the question may not simply be where a vehicle is parked for the day. It may be where it waits, charges, picks up passengers or gets serviced.
Micromobility will also require organised space as shared mobility services including two-wheelers, bicycles, delivery vehicles would need designated areas where they can stop without creating additional congestion.
So I see the future as a more connected parking ecosystem rather than simply more parking.
A parking space could become a place to park, a charging point, a digitally managed access point, or even a strategic location for mobility companies to operate and showcase their services.
The real opportunity is to get much more value from the parking infrastructure that already exists.