We will build 100 smart cities outfitted with high-tech communication capabilities, Narendra Modi had thundered, a month after taking office as prime minister on May 26, 2014.
“Cities in the past were built on riverbanks,” Modi said. “They are now built along highways. But in the future, they will be built based on availability of optical fibre networks and next-generation infrastructure.”
He announced an investment of $1.2 billion over the following year in what was said to be the world’s largest infrastructure project, with more funds to come from private sources and abroad.
In his budget speech, Modi’s finance minister Arun Jaitley gave details. Most of these new cities would be satellite towns around large cities, he said, and announced incentives for foreign investors.
Those were the days when Modi was coming up with attractive plans that the media lapped up without scrutiny. ‘Smart Cities’ was hailed as the best of Modi’s visions for modern India. For the middle classes, Modi became a hero and his ‘smart cities’ the potential centres of career opportunities.
Real estate investors, foreign suppliers, and global technology and IT firms saw more alluring business opportunities in the Smart Cities mission than in the Make-in-India project, another failed initiative. By mid-2015, 14 countries, including France, US, China, Sweden, Israel, Germany, Brazil and Singapore, had expressed interest. They were looking at major investments in Smart Cities. A dozen international institutions, such as the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and USAID, offered support. PricewaterhouseCoopers, McKinsey, Lea Associates and Bosch were the empaneled consultants. Private firms were offered equity participation and the right to impose ‘user charges’.
Also read: What Make in India Has Brought to India
Contractors were salivating at the prospects of a 7-lakh-km broadband cable to link 2.5 lakh villages with accompanying facilities like WiFi boxes and gear. It was a huge pie. France’s Thales perceived a Rs 3,300-crore market for ‘integrated solutions’ and ‘added value systems’.
Then, suddenly, a deafening silence fell all over. Private and foreign investors were not forthcoming, their investments not matching their initial interest. The financial burden on the government would be huge. The grapevine has it that someone in government – the rumour is Arun Jaitley – managed to convince Modi that his dream project was economically disastrous, technologically unsustainable and politically unwise. Citing the experience of other countries, they argued that technology was ever changing and today’s WiFi might soon be replaced by a better system. So, it would need constant updating to keep the cities ‘smart’. Politically, the ruling party might soon be charged with wasting resources on elitist and pro-rich projects while large sections lived in slums.
Ultimately, the government decided to retain the nomenclature but with a changed goal. The Smart Cities Mission would be confined to renovating and retrofitting existing cities and providing such facilities as housing, clean water, power and transport. All the schemes would be managed by the high-sounding special purpose vehicles (SPV), which are private companies or private-public-participation ventures.
The Smart Cities Mission borrowed heavily from Manmohan Singh’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and its four sub-missions. Modi’s mission also overlaps the existing Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY-U), National Urban Learning Platform (NLUP), and Housing for All 2022.
Originally, the Smart Cities Mission was scheduled to conclude its present phase by 2020, but extensions were granted because of hurdles in implementation. Finally, the government has decided to end it by March 31, 2025.
This leaves many unanswered questions. Does the government really believe that all the objectives of the mission – ‘core infrastructure, a clean environment, and smart solutions’ – have been achieved? If not, why has it been abandoned midstream? Will it be revived after reviewing the drawbacks and with appropriative correctives?
Like other Modi schemes, the defects of the mission can be traced to impulsive announcements made without ground work. The first casualty was ‘new’. Suddenly, the word ‘new’ – used in the original version to describe the cities – disappeared from all official records. Foreign media, however, continued to use it.
The unceremonious end to the Smart Cities Mission has left a trail of dislocation, loss of jobs and associated uncertainties. The SPVs, which were managing the projects, the Integrated Command and Control Centre, and monitoring the mission, have already started sacking staff. The Uttar Pradesh government has downsized its operation, and will retain only the minimum staff required under the Companies Act. Also, there is much confusion about the future of the incomplete schemes.
The mission suffers from several conceptual debilities. Unlike developed countries, there is no compact definition of a smart city in India or the programmes it needs. In developed economies, minimum facilities already exist, making it possible for them to concentrate on total digitisation and high-tech facilities. In India, the emphasis has to be on providing essentials such as food, housing, power and transport.
But the Smart Cities Mission was announced during Modi’s early days as Prime Minister when he was presenting India as a world power and himself as its strong leader. The overriding priority to project a Vishwaguru image reduced the definition of ‘smart’ into a curious mix of old schemes and high-tech dreams. A foreign study of the mission described this as a ‘catch-all umbrella’. In the process, the mission became another name for the same old programmes for water, electric supply, housing, health, transport, solid waste management, security, e-governance and digitization.
According to official claims, there are about 75 studies and analyses on the performance of the mission. Most of these safely align with the official line. Genuinely critical analyses are few or come from abroad, with foreign universities, analysts and media finding several structural debilities in the mission’s conceptualization and implementation.
Writing in The Guardian in 2015, Shruti Ravindran predicted that the mission – as it stood at the time – would end up creating ‘social apartheid’.
A study of the Aurangabad Smart City plan decried the appointment of big consultancy firms as project management consultants (PMCs). “But there is little accountability for the solution the PMCs offered… Smaller firms are a better option,” it said.
Another independent study of the Shimla Smart City by Tikender Singh Panwar, a member of the Kerala Urban Commission, found that the local bodies had been bypassed by the elite SPVs on the assumption that private management is more efficient. He found that Rs 2 crore was wasted on flower pots.
Look at the irony. We have a plethora of data on urban planning and the Smart Cities Mission: Smart City Dashboard, National Urban Learning Platform (NULP), Data Smart Cities Portal, Urban Data Exchange (IUDX) and Smart Code. Yet, investigators found there was all along a watertight information wall at the micro level that hampered a detailed analysis.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
