Smart Cities Mission: India’s initiative to develop its cities with smart solutions

In a world with more than 10,000 cities, 142 of them are labeled as smart cities, according to the Smart City Index 2024. That’s still a pretty low number, and to increase it, governments from all over the world are helding initiatives to make the number of smart cities in their countries increase each year. With that, the technology implemented will improve the quality of life of the inhabitants, as well as make the city more sustainable and its operations more efficient.

India is one of the countries that has been working hard to make the number of smart cities in its region grow, and to do so, the Indian government launched the Smart Cities Mission in 2015. Just so you can get an idea of the investment, the funding for this initiative is of ?203,979 crore (US$ 22 billion). The Mission has three pillars: Liveability, Economic-ability and Sustainability. These three are divided into 21 distinct sub-sectors, which are monitored with a set of indicators referred to as Output-Outcome Monitoring Framework (OOMF).

The pillars are directly interlinked with 15 out of the 17 UN’s SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Almost 44% of the projects contribute to SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), followed by SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) at 13%, SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) at 8.6%, and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) at 6.4%.

The main goal of the Smart Cities Mission is to transform 100 cities across India. The Union Ministry of Urban Development was responsible for implementing the mission in collaboration with the state governments of the respective cities. The deadline for completion of the project was set between 2019 and 2023. As of July 2024, 7202 out of 8018 projects had been completed, and has impacted the lives of more than 100 million citizens in India.

How were the cities selected for the program?

The cities were selected based on the Smart Cities challenge, where cities competed to obtain the benefits from the Smart Cities Mission. It was a five-year program in which financial aid was given to the cities by the central government. The Ministry of Urban Development used this competition-based method to select the cities that were going to be funded, and so the state governments were asked to nominate potential cities. Out of those, 100 were selected.

Some of India’s biggest cities were chosen, such as New Delhi, Jaipur, Coimbatore, Chennai and Kolkata.

Technology and innovation implementation

Smart Cities Mission implements selected Smart Solutions to the existing city-wide infrastructure. This application will involve the use of technology, information and data to improve infrastructure and services. The Mission pioneered the use of ICCC (Integrated Command and Control Centre), a system which is described as the technological “brain and nervous system” of the city. An ICCC has five key components, which include bandwidth; sensors and edge devices that generate real-time information; analytics or software which uses the data captured to provide actionable inputs to the city administration; data storage; and the main ICCC platform which anchors different applications pertaining to city services and may be referred to as a “system of systems”.?

Smart Cities Mission is considering the development of “ICCC-as-a-service (IaaS)”, which will extend the benefits of the platform to other public sector services and work as a business model for the cities of the Mission to generate revenue. While ICCC is a flagship initiative of the Mission, the selected cities experimented many other technological solutions to optimize their existing infrastructure, which included the SCADA system to optimize water supply, water meters and Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to improve public transportation service, among others.?

Main principles:

Transparency: open and transparent practices are essential to enable stakeholders and the public to understand the goals of smart city projects;

Capacity building: using smart technologies in urban development requires national, subnational and local governments to have the capacity to conduct data collection, mapping, analysis and dissemination;

Sensor-based solutions: cities must have updated governance and financing models to set up shared services across departments, integrate data and redesign workflow to fully utilize sensor-based solutions.

Why are smart cities especially important for India?

Almost 11% (498 million) of the world’s urban population resides in India. Furthermore, 416 million new urban residents would be added in the country between 2018 and 2050. It is the second largest urban system in the world, with 7,935 urban settlements.?

The 53 Indian cities with more than 1 million inhabitants accommodate approximately a third of the total urban population, and yet the 7,839 small and medium cities with population under 500,000 people are significantly growing.?

Also, around 180 million people live in rural areas situated next to India’s 70 largest urban centers, which will increase to about 210 million people by 2030. It is also import to note that cities contribute two-third of the country’s GDP today.

There is also the obvious answer, which is that India is the most populous country in the world, with 1.4 billion inhabitants in 2024. Cities with an adequate infrastructure, that meet with the citizens needs, are essential.