Smart Cities: Modi government's mission impossible

I walk out of my house and onto the street and look around. Not much is different from 10 years ago except that there is more traffic. 'Crores spent, Smart Cities Mission leaves behind more bills, superficial infrastructure’, reads a headline from a couple of days ago. The report says what is obvious to those who examine what is around them: that a 10-year programme that ended this year has made no impact. Now that it is dead and buried and no further promises will be made over it, we can sift through its remains.

The Smart Cities mission was set up with a concept note that said the aim was to make cities that would offer ‘decent living options to every resident’, which would provide a ‘very high quality of life comparable with any developed European city’, according to the urban ministry’s concept note on Smart Cities. The government said this would happen by 2020.

These Smart Cities were required, Arun Jaitley told Parliament in 2014, to service the middle class that Modi’s economic policies would greatly expand. The following year, 2015, the language was tweaked to make the target more modest and, instead of emulating a European city, we were told that the Smart City of India would provide citizens with adequate water supply, assured electricity supply, sanitation, public transport, affordable housing for the poor, safety of women, health and education.

This was, of course, not different from what the municipalities in all cities were focused on in any case. The problem was one of hard governance and not logo and nomenclature alone. This may be why the Modi government’s interest in this waned almost immediately.

It was reported in 2021 that the ‘Smart Cities project had failed to take off, with half of its funds unspent’. The project ‘should have been on its winning lap come 2020’, the report said, but instead, the reality was that by 2019, of the total Rs 48,000 crore ‘approved’ between 2015 and 2019, only half was actually allocated. Of this half, only three-fourth was then actually released, and of what was released, a mere 36 per cent was then utilised. While Rs 48,000 crore had been ‘approved’, only Rs 6,160 crore was spent. 

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Urban Development said it was ‘perplexed about the actual progress made so far under the Mission at ground level’ and it also ‘observed numerous instances of one agency undoing the work of another’.

Of the 35 states and Union Territories, 26 had utilised less than 20 per cent of the funds released. The usual problems associated with India also came to light. The standing committee said it was ‘surprised to find that in spite of available mechanisms, the complaints about poor work under the Mission are still pouring in before the Committee’. It recommended that ‘all those cases questioning the claim of work done under Smart Cities emanating from local MPs be probed expeditiously and the guilty be brought to book’. 

News reports from organs that were still interested in the issue pointed out some primary flaws with the Smart Cities mission. It emphasised high-end infrastructure and technology-driven surveillance, but did not address amenities — water, schools, public hospitals, housing. With its area-based development, it was focused on spending most of the money on small patches of city centres that were already developed.

In Bengaluru, for instance, the Smart Cities allocation was used on developing Church Street — which was already developed more than most of the rest of the city — and elite neighbourhoods like Infantry Road, Kamaraj Road, Tata Lane, Wood Street, Castle Street, Dickenson Road, Kensington Road, St John’s Road, Residency Road, Kasturba Road, Bowring Hospital Road, Millers Road, Lavelle Road, McGrath Road, Convent Road, Queen’s Road, Hayes Road, Raja Ram Mohan Roy Road and Race Course Road. 

In Delhi, it was the area under the New Delhi Municipal Corporation, also already the most developed part of the National Capital Region. The mission was aimed at a particular section, the upper class, which comprised a very small part of the population and not any neo-middle class, which Modi’s economic policies in any case didn’t produce.

The elitism showed elsewhere, for instance in the public bicycle-sharing project implemented by many cities, including Pune, Delhi, Bhopal and Coimbatore. The instructions for hiring a bicycle on the company’s website were only in English, and it only accepted online payment. Smart Cities were pushing India's urban poor further to the margins.

‘Allocations’ in 2019 remained the same as in 2018. And in the 2021 Budget, the phrase ‘Smart Cities’ was not used at all. The former deputy mayor of Shimla, Tikender Singh Panwar, explained why: "These Smart Cities were supposed to be lighthouses for other cities in the country. The Budget is completely silent over it owing to the fact that it has become one of the biggest embarrassments to the Modi government."

This is why you likely did not know what the programme was intended to do (other than having a glitzy name), what change it actually achieved or indeed that the programme had been ended, never to be spoken of again.

Views are personal. More of Aakar Patel’s writing may be read here