The evolution of the smart cities agenda in India

Abstract

With the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014, urban-led economic growth in India was firmly framed around a vision of ‘smart cities’, an ambiguous concept, which promotes the integration of information and communication technologies in cities to improve economic growth, quality of life, governance, mobility and sustainability. Given its current policy importance, this article examines how the smart cities agenda in India has emerged, what it has encompassed and its potential for transformative urban development. Reviewing policy documents and statements in combination with selected key stakeholder interviews, this article traces the emergence of the smart cities discourse in India, suggesting that the vision and concept of the smart city has shifted over time and has been evoked in different ways to serve different purposes. Overall, the smart cities agenda in India appears to be characterized by a failure to conceptualize and develop an integrated set of policies, and while a clearer (yet contested) concept is emerging, the prospects for success are uncertain.

Keywords

Urban India urban governance urban planning planned cities smart cities inclusive growth

Introduction

India’s transition from a rural to urban society will be one of the largest and most transformative demographic shifts the world has ever seen and represents a fundamental social challenge. Despite aspirations to remake its metropolises through economic liberalization, governance reforms and attracting foreign capital, India’s cities face numerous burdens, lacking the financial, technocratic and governance capacities to accommodate fully urban citizens in a prosperous, equitable and just manner. Despite the fact that India’s cities are now the country’s primary engines of economic and demographic growth, this is threatened by informality, poor infrastructure and inadequate planning and governance. The underlying implication is that in concert with governance reforms, technical, market-oriented solutions are required to realize India’s urban potential (McKinsey Global Institute, 2010).

This is exemplified in the business-friendly, pro-urban policies that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government have forwarded, most notably the current Smart Cities Mission (SCM), whose goal is to create cities with smart physical, social institutional and economic infrastructure (Government of India (GoI), 2014a). This is to be done through the promotion of instruments including clean technology use, widespread information and communication technology (ICT) reliance, financing via public private partnerships (PPPs) and private sector investment, improved citizen consultation, and ‘smart’ or e-governance initiatives rolled out for urban local bodies (ULBs) (GoI, 2014). These cities would offer:

[g]ood quality but affordable housing, cost efficient physical, social and institutional infrastructure such as adequate and quality water supply, sanitation, 24 x 7 electric supply, clean air, quality education, cost efficient health care, dependable security, entertainment, sports, robust and high speed interconnectivity, fast & efficient urban mobility. (GoI, 2014)

Despite the increasing ubiquity of the term, there has been considerable confusion around what a smart city is in practice and what the smart city agenda in India represents – with discourses and terminologies used by different actors to serve different ends.¹ Neither in India nor globally is there an agreed-upon definition. Smart cities variously include some form of technological, organizational and policy innovation to channel physical, social and ICT infrastructures for economic regeneration, social cohesion, improved city administration and infrastructure management (Hollands, 2008; Nam and Pardo, 2011). In India, the current government considers the smart city is an amorphous, context-dependent mix of institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructures (GoI, 2015).² From the mid- to late-2000s, private and public interests have used the language of smart cities to promote new and largely privately built and governed cities on greenfield sites, often in special economic zones (SEZs). Reflecting this, in his ascent to national office, Modi’s election manifesto promised that ‘100 new cities’ would be built; yet this position softened following his election, with the focus shifting from ‘new’ cities to ‘smart’ cities. Yet despite a move towards more participatory and less grandiose smart cities, it is unclear whether the current SCM will deliver urban economic growth and infrastructure solutions while at the same time creating socially, economically and inclusive cities.

In reviewing the evolution of the smart city in India, this article critically examines the concept and how its emergence in policy discourse reflects shifting political goals and realities. The article: (i) traces the emergence and evolution of the smart cities concept in India; (ii) examines how the concept is used to different ends by a range of actors; and (iii) considers the implications of this trend. I argue that since its inception, the smart cities paradigm has been an elite-driven project focusing on private capital accumulation and urban, technology-led growth. I also argue that it is tied not only to both of these but to the political economy of India’s wider post-liberalization socio-economic restructuring, and to the aspirational desire to ‘escape’ urban informality.³ Initially conceived of as an agenda emphasizing the construction of new cities along strategic transport corridors, the broader smart cities agenda has since embraced a more participatory approach under the SCM, at least in its rhetoric. Needing to bend to challenging political and economic realities, principally concerning financing and land acquisition, the current SCM has shifted focus towards a more grounded approach involving brownfield reconstruction and retrofitting in existing cities; with an increasing focus on participation in its vision, language and process.

The following section situates the emergence of the smart city in the context of urban informality and the political economy of post-liberalization India. Focusing on an analysis of policy documents and official statements, and supplemented with key stakeholder interviews, I then trace the evolution of the smart cities paradigm, how the discourse has been used by different actors, and outline how it has changed in scope and ambition. The following section takes stock of this evolution, and the final section summarizes and concludes.

The informal city and the smart solution

India has enacted several underwhelming urban policies in recent years. For example, the infrastructure-focused Mega City Scheme, rolled out in 1993 in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai,⁴ was hamstrung by funding shortages over its ten-year lifespan (Chakravorty, 1996; GoI, 2004). Subsequently launched in 2005, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was India’s flagship urban programme that ran in two phases until the Modi government came to power in 2014. While designed to transform urban governance and service delivery by increasing budgets and devolving authority to ULBs (Aijaz and Hoelscher, 2015), it showed that merely increasing funding for urban policy was insufficient unless local actors were empowered to implement policy. JNNURM was criticized for funding delays, incomplete devolution of power and ineffective urban land acquisition processes (GoI, 2012a; Weinstein et al., 2014).⁵ Despite the potential for more autonomous and empowered urban governance as provisioned under the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (Aijaz, 2008; Weinstein, 2009), devolution to ULBs has been incomplete and largely unsuccessful.

Informality and (un)planning

The muted success of JNNURM and related urban policies is linked in part with India’s urban informality. Urban governance and basic services are often organized and provided through informal mechanisms (Miklian and Carney, 2013). Informal economies provide livelihoods for the majority of urban dwellers; grassroots organization is used to gain rights of citizenship, tenure and service delivery (Appadurai, 2001; Roy, 2009); and informal local-level political connections are used to influence modes of urban governance (Benjamin, 2008). Moreover, urban informality in planning, construction and land use in Indian cities hinders formal planning activities, such as the design and implementation of functional spatial plans (Ansari, 2004). Formal long-term planning approaches are generally enacted through Master Plans proscribing the use and development of land under current and future boundaries of a city. Yet these often prove cumbersome when dealing with changing land use patterns that come with the informal appropriation, sale and governance of urban territory, or economic expansion within it (Pethe et al., 2014).

In negotiating and contending with this ‘informal city’, middle class and elite interests are often protected by systemic inequalities built into practices of urban governance and planning. Formal urban or municipal governance practices operate in a flexible and uneven manner to negotiate complex and archaic bureaucracies (often exacerbated by bribe taking and corruption by municipal workers)⁶ and have inbuilt ambiguities, which logically justify and defend various courses of policy action (Bhan, 2013; Desai, 2012). Hence urban governance and planning initiatives in reform-era India are often ‘interpreted as intentionally created zones of exceptions embedded in a calculated urban informality’ (Follman, 2015: 213), operating under ‘paradigm(s) of deliberate confusion’ (Mahadevia, 2011). Policies seeking to achieve ‘inclusive growth’ are frequently contradictory and rarely achieve both economic growth and socio-economic inclusion (Roy, 2014). Yet as Chatterjee (2008) reveals, electoral democracy in India has at least partially forced elites to concede certain rights to the urban poor. Furthermore, while elites may move between evoking and employing formal and informal practices in the city to serve their own ends, they must also bear the additional (and considerable) costs of creating order within the ‘messiness’ of informality in urban India and extending a modicum of basic rights to the poor.

Market-led urban development as a solution

In further contextualizing urban informality and the smart city, it is helpful to view this process in light of the political economy of post-liberalization India.⁷ Since economic liberalization in the 1990s opened markets to foreign investment, India has shifted from a state-centric to market-centric organization of social, political and economic life, driven by processes of urbanization, globalization and decentralization (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000; Ruparelia, et al., 2011; Sanyal 2007; Varshney, 2007). As Bhan (2009) notes, contemporary India has been framed by transformations to liberal market economies, a focus on developing world class cities (and world class service sectors within them), and increasingly aspirational attitudes of the middle and upper classes (see also Nigam and Menon, 2007). Yet while India’s democratic and economic transformation has shaped aspirational desires to create modernized urban spaces, it has also been at odds with urban informality – a political economic impediment to modernizing reforms⁸ or gentrification strategies. Despite liberal electoral democracy opening opportunities for capital accumulation, it has also protected the basic rights of the urban poor to resist urban middle class gentrification (Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 2011; Chatterjee 2008). In response, elites have increasingly pursued ‘bypass urbanization’, which ‘seeks to decongest post-colonial metropolises by building new towns for a new economy of knowledge-based activities and businesses driven by global capital on their fringes’ (Bhattacharya and Sanyal, 2011: 41).

Dovetailing with this desire to remake or create India’s cities anew, the oft-referred to McKinsey Global Institute’s (2010) report on India’s ‘urban awakening’ has been influential in both highlighting the myriad challenges facing Indian cities and reiterating a market-led approach to urban development through transport- and infrastructure-related growth. This has been important in shaping the evolution of the urban policy discourse, both tying current policy approaches to India’s longer run political economy of urban development and framing informality as an impediment to growth; with urban ‘development’ and ‘modernization’ becoming synonymous with formalized, marketized urban spaces. It is with this as a backdrop that the concept of smart cities began to emerge fully in the Indian political discourse in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

The evolution of the smart city

In this section, I review policy documents, academic works, media reports and government statements to trace the evolution of the smart cities discourse over the past two decades. I contextualize this through open-ended qualitative interviews with selected key stakeholders and experts in policy and research arenas carried out between October and December 2015. I show how different stakeholders use the smart cities discourse to promote different agendas, and that policy positions have slowly shifted towards a potentially more grounded and participatory agenda under the SCM.

Early visions of the smart city: 2000–2009

The smart city concept initially emerged from e-governance movements and collaboration between technology companies and governments in Europe and the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Coe et al., 2001). Policies labelled as ‘smart city’ in nature have included practices of retrofitting existing cities, such as Barcelona and Amsterdam, which are both held up as examples of best practice. They have also included greenfield projects – those built from scratch on ‘vacant’ land – for example, Songdo in South Korea, a high tech smart city project dubbed the city of the future, and also the world’s largest private real estate development.⁹ Smart cities also tend to focus on ICT integration in modern urban infrastructures (Alawadhi et al., 2012), though the validity of both the term and concept has been fiercely challenged (Albino et al., 2015), particularly with regards to what constitutes a smart city and whom they should benefit. This early European-centric experience saw smart cities generally delivering incremental benefits through urban retrofitting that integrated technological systems and solutions into already highly networked and economically developed cities.

A precursor to the Indian smart city was the embrace of urban e-governance in the early to mid-2000s. Increasingly ubiquitous ICTs were encouraged by both ULBs and technology companies to be integrated into governance delivery practices,¹⁰ primarily in public sector use of online or ICT-assisted solutions to improve information and service delivery, citizen participation, accountability and transparency. International technology companies such as Samsung and Siemens began providing initially cheap or free services and software solutions for municipalities and ULBs,¹¹ organizing high profile events that framed the technological solutions these companies provided as essential for urban development, which often delivered meaningful benefits for both state and citizen (Chaudhuri, 2014). According to one senior academic in the planning field, this state of affairs since the mid-2000s has been characterized by a ‘silent revolution’ in the ICT and telecoms sector, intertwined with the propagation of mobile-based technology in the realm of urban policy.¹²

The Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC), Dholera and the proliferation of smart city imaginaries: 2009–2014

This early linking of the private sector and ICT-related e-governance, as well as the embrace and permeation of the smart cities concept in Europe in the mid-2000s (Caragliu et al., 2011),¹³ paved the way for the emergence of the Indian smart city in the late 2000s. As one former Indian Urban Development secretary stated of the emergence of smart cities in government policy discourse, smart cities had ‘become a global buzzword, and all of us had started taking note’.¹⁴ Yet rather than linked with incremental improvements in service delivery, such as existing e-governance initiatives, smart cities were seen in India more as a means to build on the coagulation of state and private sector interests in infrastructure-led growth. In particular, this period is one where there was heightened interest in building new or greenfield cities and can be linked with the Indian government’s development of industrial settlements and SEZs to both promote industry-led urban growth and provide new urban spaces to address the population challenges in existing cities (Anand and Sami, 2015). At this juncture, Indian smart cities were arguably a logical extension of these earlier policy initiatives to promote urban industrialization – SEZs and industrial townships¹⁵ – insofar as they presented opportunities for synergies between public and private interests in the technology and construction sectors and for the accumulation and consolidation of political and economic capital.

This was evidenced with the establishment of the DMIC in 2007, a USD100 billion state-sponsored industrial development project incorporating linked manufacturing centres, transport infrastructure and industrial clusters between India’s political and economic capitals of Delhi and Mumbai.¹⁶ Initially designed to stimulate the manufacturing sector, the DMIC quickly emerged as a means to address urban development through policies that included the construction of new cities and, over time, became linked with smart city development. Due to initially incorporate 7 smart cities with a total of 24 planned for phased development, by 2012 the DMIC was declared as ‘the only major programme for development of new cities in India’ (FICCI, 2012: 30). It would ‘provide a major impetus to planned urbanization in India with manufacturing as the key driver’.¹⁷ Further, the then United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government was drawing on and synergizing with state-based urban policies that integrated market-led approaches to urban planning and development.¹⁸ The UPA admired the approaches taken in states like Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra over the previous 10 years,¹⁹ and cautiously pursued synergies between the DMIC and state-based urban development projects.²⁰

Of particular interest were the projects of Dholera and GIFT City, two under-construction greenfield projects in Gujarat tied to the DMIC that are proclaimed as the first smart cities in India. Conceived of between 2007 and 2009, during Modi’s time as Chief Minister, these projects came to symbolize the earliest representations of the ‘Indian smart city’, and were integral to the emergence of a paradigm that evoked the marriage of urban development and technological expansion. Dholera and GIFT City were conceived as globally connected financial and technological hubs catering to a new Indian elite,²¹ built from scratch in specially created SEZs and special investment regions (SIRs). More importantly, the ‘grand visions’ of these types of cities were enabled through the Gujarat model of entrepreneurial urbanization, where speed was of the essence and red tape was shorn away (Datta 2015). Their expense – Dholera is estimated to cost over USD10 billion by its projected completion somewhere between 2030 and 2040²² – necessitated large inflows of domestic and foreign investment and relied on creating favourable conditions for investors.

Chief among these was the Special Investment Region (SIR) Act passed in Gujarat in March 2009 to overcome what had been seen as the ‘land challenge’ – particularly the acquisition of large tracts of contiguous land for large-scale development projects. In Gujarat, the SIR Act superseded the national-level Land Acquisition Act of 1894, an Act dating back to the Raj designed to protect and fairly compensate landowners whose property was acquired under eminent domain. The SIR Act enabled the state government to take up to 50% of a landowner’s land for urbanization and development purposes, with faster processing, but without necessarily fair compensation. Moreover, as Datta (2015) clearly spells out, this process of new industrial, entrepreneurial urbanization became intricately tied up in the ‘smartness’ discourse, with SIR projects such as Dholera being reframed from ‘industrial townships’ to ‘smart cities’.²³

Reflecting this interest in new cities, the national UPA government further embraced the smart cities paradigm in phase 2 of JNNURM (JNNURM-2), garnering considerable support among state secretaries and ministers in the Congress party and the government by 2012.²⁴ Similar to state-business linkages in embracing urban e-governance in the mid-2000s, the private sector shaped the smart cities discourse around the DMIC and JNNURM-2 by framing technomanagerial solutions as integral to urban development.²⁵ In April 2012, the then UPA Minister for Urban Development, Kamal Nath, announced that the DMIC’s wave of smart city construction offered European companies lucrative opportunities to ‘pitch in with their best technologies, smart concepts and services’ (FICCI, 2012: 31). Nath claimed JNNURM-2 would incorporate at least two smart cities in each state built with overseas funding contributions and technical collaboration (LiveMint, 2012; The Hindu, 2012). Yet while the government saw promise in the smart city concept, existing cities still remained the priority in their urban programmes. One former member of the Urban Development Ministry said that while the then-government believed that ‘technology offer(ed) a good opportunity’ to modernize and catch up, ‘investment in existing cities through modern technology was given high priority’.²⁶

Modi’s ‘100 new smart cities’ meets the realities of government: 2014–2015

This began to shift, however, with Modi’s ascent to national office, as he brought experiences from Gujarat, which focused on large infrastructure projects and ‘grand visions’ of the smart city as the solution to India’s urban challenges. In many respects, the period from early 2014 during Modi’s campaigning for Prime Minister through the first year of his leadership to mid-2015 presented a remarkably confusing account of the smart city. It saw a shift in discourse from smart cities as SIR/SEZs that would attract global investment and house a new urban elite, to smart cities being more actively framed as inclusive projects within existing cities. I suggest that this shift was precipitated by the challenges in transforming political rhetoric into policy following Modi’s election. Rather quickly, the new government realized that a project of 100 new smart cities was not workable, affordable, or politically possible, and the smart cities vision was reigned in.²⁷ During this period, official documents, including the Ministry of Urban Development’s Smart Cities Concept Notes of September and December 2014 (GoI, 2014a, 2014b), offer an insight into the government’s changing policy conceptualization. They represent a melting pot of the grand visions of 100 smart cities mingling with new political realities – particularly constraints over land acquisition, financing and inclusiveness.

From early 2014, during election campaigning, Modi’s vision of urban development was largely an extension of his approach as Chief Minister in Gujarat. Taking the fast-tracked, red tape cutting examples of Dholera and GIFT City as prototypes, Modi focused on taking large-scale industrialization – primarily involving greenfield construction of satellite cities on the outskirts of existing cities –to the national stage. This is seen in the BJP Election Manifesto, which promised – as its very first point – the ‘Building (of) 100 new cities, enabled with the latest in technology and infrastructure’ (BJP 2014). Moreover, in his 2014–2015 budget speech of 10 July 2014 shortly after the BJP came to power, Finance Minister, Arun Jaitley, stated that ‘unless new cities are developed to accommodate the burgeoning number of people, the existing cities would soon become unliveable’.²⁸ While the need to upgrade existing cities was present in early statements of the government, proclamations of smart cities as ‘new’ cities that ‘needed to be built’ were readily and repeatedly touted through the election campaign and following the BJP electoral victory; and drove the ‘100 new smart cities’ narrative.

Yet when scrutinizing the Smart City Concept Notes of September and December 2014, (GoI, 2014a, 2014b), the emphasis on greenfield development was largely downplayed, with remarks that ‘it has been the experience world over that developing greenfield cities have seldom been successful’ (GoI, 2014a). Instead, the focus had shifted towards upgrading existing cities with an all-encompassing, multi-sectoral, multi-institutional approach to the city, such that almost any urban project could justifiably fall under the smart cities umbrella. In reading the December Concept Note, Shrivasthan (2015) suggested that as outlined, the smart city programme ‘started sounding like every other urban development programme that preceded it’ with the only minor differences being that proposed cities ‘must have a mandatory ICT component’ and that financing would be allocated to those ‘which compete and qualify as Smart City’. While pitched as a bold leap in urban programming, the reality is somewhat less exciting. As it stands, the SCM opens the door for new ICTs to be used in virtually any manner seen fit, yet does not offer a clear framework to address urban governance challenges; neither does it offer particularly new ways to grapple with the structural impediments of Indian cities.

Another shift was in the extent of civil society participation. Similar to criticisms of earlier industrial towns and SEZs as separate ‘spatial-legal regimes’ (Idiculla, 2015), ushering in an age of ‘corporate urbanism’ (Sood, 2015), the smart city concept was flagged as a process of elite accumulation where the citizen was largely absent. Burte surmized that:

In a situation where urban infrastructural and real estate development in India offers a great investment opportunity for roving local and global capital, the Smart City idea is a card waiting to be played right. It combines definitional ambiguity (allowing valuable elbow room in actual implementation), attractiveness to the affluent urban middle class (for the developed world experience it promises, as well as for the technomanagerial vision of urban governance at its heart), and the potential for leveraging these two phenomena together to create political consensus for a brand new business opportunity for global capital. (Burte 2014: 25)

Given these criticisms of elitism in the smart city agenda, the government began to move towards a more participative idea of the smart city that was largely absent in previous years, admitting that ‘current governance structures do not focus on citizen participation … therefore, there is a need for involving citizens in decision-making processes (GoI, 2014b: 7). Plans for a citizen reference framework were introduced in Smart City Concept Notes, suggesting an evolution in government thinking about citizen participation. Prior to this, there had been virtually no mention of civil society’s role in shaping the smart cities agenda, and particularly the role of excluded or marginalized groups. In the Concept Notes, statements about excluded groups were present for the first time in official statements on the smart city, claiming that it is ‘necessary that (the) city promotes inclusiveness and (the) city has structures which proactively bring disadvantageous sections i.e. SCs, STs, socially and financially backwards, minorities, disabled and women into the mainstream of development’ (GoI, 2014b: 6).

Yet even with shifts to more ‘inclusive’ language, the mechanisms for citizen engagement were poorly specified, contrasting with a detailed focus on vehicles and instruments covering management, financing and technological innovation. The government’s December 2014 Smart City Concept Note reminded readers that ‘while capturing (the) aspirations and expectations (of citizens), the main objectives of Smart Cities in employment generation and creation of economic activities need to remain in focus’ (GoI, 2014b: 25). Broadly, these documents still remained focused on integrated ICT-use to address urban economic growth, with ‘little elaborated in terms of empowering the citizenry through use of these tools’ and a ‘lack of benchmark(s) on citizen participation’ (Shiraz, 2014: np). Therefore, while there were positive moves towards inclusive language (despite mechanisms for citizen engagement being poorly specified), the idea of smart cities as technologically driven urban growth projects is retained, with the primary location shifting to existing urban settlements.

In understanding these shifts, the issue of land acquisition is particularly important, as acquiring sizeable tracts of land is essential to large-scale infrastructure and urbanization projects. Land has long been contentiously and intricately tied up with processes of dispossession and elite accumulation, state-citizen power relations and rural livelihoods and capacities in India (Baka, 2013; Levien, 2012; Narain, 2009). Land acquisition processes have hamstrung Modi’s attempts at industrialization in both Gujarat, when he was Chief Minister, and India itself, now as Prime Minister. In Gujarat, despite the SIR Act of 2009, large tracts of land often remained difficult to acquire and stalled progress on DMIC cities in the state. At the national level, this was made even more challenging when the antiquated Land Acquisition Act of 1894 was replaced by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR) Act in 2013. Introduced by the former UPA government, the new LARR came into force on 1 January 2014, heavily siding with landowners in delivering ‘a humane, participative, informed and transparent process for land acquisition for industrialisation, development of essential infrastructural facilities and urbanisation’ (GoI, 2013: 1). It made acquisition of land a more complex and lengthy process, mandating consultation with local gram sabhas (village councils), a minimum 70% approval from landowners, fair compensation of twice the market value for urban land and quadruple the market value for rural land, plus adequate resettlement and rehabilitation for those affected.

The LARR therefore presented a fundamental challenge to the 100 new smart cities vision by making the acquisition of rural or peri-urban land for the purpose of new urban development considerably more difficult and expensive, given the requirements of majority approval for transactions and above-market compensation. Recognizing the importance that land acquisition had for the smart city agenda – and particularly for the prospects of developing entirely new urban areas – in December 2014 the Modi government issued a temporary executive order, or ordinance, to remove requirements of landowner consent and social impact assessments for forcibly acquired land for developmental purposes. Further, based on these ordinances, the government sought to push through an amendment to the LARR that would make these ordinances permanent and expand categories of projects included as ‘for development purposes’ to cover a wide range of major infrastructure projects, including almost all those under the smart cities rubric.

While this move was presented as both safeguarding the needs of the landowner and ensuring economic growth and cutting unnecessary red tape (i.e. removing complications in transactions between willing buyers and sellers), the move was roundly criticized. Following a highly fractious attempt to pass the amendment through parliament – including the extension of the temporary ordinance three times and rebellion from within his own coalition – Modi admitted defeat by allowing the third ordinance to lapse on 31 August 2015. No longer able to either easily or cheaply acquire land, the smart city turned from being a project largely focused on greenfield development of new cities for the upper and middle classes, to one more oriented towards the redevelopment of existing cities.

The SCM: 2015–today

The outcome of this process led to the SCM,²⁹ launched as a government programme in June 2015 to develop 100 smart cities, with an allocation of 4800 crore rupees (approximately USD700 million) over five years.³⁰ An additional 500 Indian towns and cities would also be covered under a separate programme (less focused on smart solutions), the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), and was complemented by the Swachh Bharat Yojana (Clean India Campaign) and Heritage City Development & Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY), which take up and extend certain functions of the JNNURM.³¹ What is clear is that these missions, while important, are secondary to the flagship SCM.

Stage 1 of the SCM involved the competitive selection of 100 cities covering all Indian states based on a combination of population weighting for each state and a range of governance indicators and capacity benchmarks. Stage 2 commenced in August 2015 with the announcement of 98 shortlisted cities, with candidates required to prepare a smart city proposal (SCP) outlining their suitability for receiving further funding according to a set of criteria presented in mission documents. Plans were required to follow an area-based approach, such that certain areas within a city would be the focus of being made ‘smart’, either through upgrading areas in existing cities through retrofitting or redevelopment; or developing new greenfield sites of more than 250 acres within the geographic limits of the ULB or Urban Development Authority (UDA). Moreover, cities were also required to implement a pan-city approach to improve city-wide infrastructure in one or more sectors. As noted, SCM guidelines called for extensive citizen and stakeholder consultation. The development of these plans began in late 2015 with the help of consultancy or ‘hand-holding’ agencies to assist in the conceptualization and development of area-based and pan-city projects. Plans by smart cities candidates were submitted by 15 December 2015, with the first 20 cities receiving first-round funding announced on 28 January 2016.

The progression from earlier visions of the smart city is apparent when examining the SCM mission statement and guidelines and related documents stemming from the Mission Launch in June 2015. The mission statement outlines far more concretely the roles of government (at different levels) and the private sector; the different mechanisms and vehicles used to finance and implement the mission; and procedures for selection and management of smart city projects. An additional shift in presentation is that the SCMs’ strategic goals are instead presented as tied to improvements in already existing cities: namely ‘city improvement (retrofitting), city renewal (redevelopment) and city extension (greenfield development)’ (GoI, 2015: 7). The SCM guidelines also present a more inclusive vision of smart cites than previous statements or documents. Citizen participation is one of five key instruments of the smart city, and in discussing the ‘core infrastructure elements’ of a smart city, ‘affordable housing, especially for the poor’ is explicitly included (GoI, 2015: 6). SCPs are said to be evaluated on their inclusiveness and how the poor and disadvantaged will benefit;³² and mandate that at least 15% of new housing in greenfield developments must be affordable housing.

Yet there remains a tension in SCM guidelines between economic efficiency and social inclusivity. There is a clear focus that as implementers and managers of smart cities, SPVs will need to generate adequate financing both to guarantee investor returns and ensure sufficient working capital (GoI, 2015). Financial viability will inevitably be a key criterion for city selection, resonating with the competitive nature of how the SCM has framed selection of phase 2 cities. By setting up fund disbursement as a competitive ‘challenge phase’, it has become, as one interviewee termed it, ‘a race’. To the interviewee, there was a ‘mad rush in the way (the SCM) has been planned and prepared’,³³ and that SCPs were being developed with a gold rush mentality due to their main interest being ‘funds from the centre’. Many cities and consulting agencies seem to be applying the same templates and best practice examples,³⁴ with little appreciation of both positive and negative experiences of various European smart cities and with few unique, context-specific ideas emerging in early SCP development.³⁵

Guidelines also present the mission as fundamentally requiring private sector and/or international organization involvement for success. The suggested model is the use of PPPs and joint ventures to finance projects, with investor returns coming through capital gains from commercial development, or through charging user fees once new services are in place. Yet emerging tensions from the reliance on the private sector was outlined by Amitabh Kundu, who stated that:

The Centre can in no way ensure inclusiveness for the urban poor, migrants and the marginalised if it hands over its responsibilities in terms of infrastructure and basic service provision to the private sector on such a mass scale. What kind of safeguards can the government possibly have in place when it is only providing 20 per cent of the funding for Smart Cities and just 10 per cent of the funding for its ‘Housing for All’ mission? (The Indian Express 2015)

Hence, while the smart cities agenda claims citizen consultation in planning processes, (mission documents on multiple occasions mention ‘consultation with citizens’), they do not yet specify exactly how this should occur or which goals should take precedence when interests clash. Further, there are concerns about which citizens will be consulted as to the design of smart cities;³⁶ and the broader issues of whether a smart city can de facto deliver inclusion as well as participation.³⁷

Ambiguity, contention and the past as future?

Despite the new SCM, there remains a splintered vision of the smart city in India. Because of its ambiguity and diffusive nature, the smart city concept continues to be appropriated and reappropriated by various actors to serve political and economic ends. An example may be seen in the city of Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh, which was left off the list of 98 cities selected for the SCM despite being widely expected to be chosen. Adamant that Vijayawada would be a smart city, the state government contracted tech company, Cisco, to implement a ‘proof of concept’ of Cisco’s own smart city blueprint³⁸ as an area-based initiative (The Hindu 2015). Furthermore, Andhra Pradesh plans to build its new capital,³⁹ Amaravati, from scratch as a smart city by 2024, enlisting the assistance of the Singaporean government and construction and design partners. Similar unilateral signings of Memorandum of Understandings or agreements with foreign governments, international institutions or technology companies have, and continue, to occur (Bhattacharya and Rathi, 2015). Thus, while on the one hand, the national government seeks to control the narrative of which cities will and will not be official smart cities, they also support the proliferation of non-mission smart cities. Indeed Modi himself laid the foundation stone in Amaravati. While seeking to present a cohesive vision of the smart city, the national government has limited influence over how the smart city discourse is used other than through central disbursement of funds as part of the SCM (which are minimal compared to project requirements and gaps filled by private sector investments).

Beyond the emergence of ‘non-mission’ smart cities, the agenda itself is still widely challenged by issues of land, financing and inclusivity. A consistent criticism remains that despite inclusive language, smart cities still represent the concentration of elite power through private interests in urban development (Datta, 2015; Economic and Political Weekly 2010). Architect and urban theorist, Rahul Mehotra, believes that they are ‘founded on capital and investment, but don’t consider the human being as part of this equation’, and that he has ‘no idea what the Smart City is’ (LiveMint, 2015). Yet while the wider discourse remains somewhat sceptical, often viewing the SCM as an attempt to remake India’s urban future according to a fundamentally exclusionary vision, we should not be too quick to dismiss progress made towards citizen participation in the smart city. While there are clearly issues with the depth of participation, positive steps have been taken by the current government that can be built on to improve local governance and strengthen civil society participation (see also Aijaz and Hoelscher, 2015).

Yet we should also be equally attendant to challenges in creating participation and inclusion. While ‘new’ cities are now largely off the cards, the SCMs’ area-based approach risks perpetuating practices of spatial segregation in land use, planning, and middle and upper class enclavism that have long been prevalent in India (Dupont, 2015), and resonates with new forms of urban gentrification as ‘displacement, dispossession and development’ (Doshi, 2015). Critics also caution that smart city logics may lead to the exclusion or controlled inclusion of certain groups, and extend practices of urban governmentality, ‘environmentality’ and biopolitics (see Gabrys, 2014).⁴⁰ Sharply contrasting with the inclusive language of the SCM in advocating for private urban utopias, the Chief Economist of Indicus Analytics, Laveesh Bhandari, stated at a 2015 smart cities industry event attended by business and government officials that:

When we build these Smart Cities we will be faced with a massive surge of people who will desire to enter these cities. We will be forced to keep them out … Even with high prices, the conventional laws in India will not enable us to exclude millions of poor Indians … Hence the police will need to physically exclude people from such cities, and they will need a different set of laws from those operating in the rest of India for them to be able to do so. Creating special enclaves is the only method of doing so. (Bhandari, 2015: 16)

Such statements reveal both that the smart city is evoked in different ways to serve different ends and that the smart cities agenda has been related to ‘socio-technological processes that have historically splintered, divided or deepened urban wealth, class, caste or information divisions and other forms of spatial segregation’ (Sadoway and Shekhar, 2014: np). Critically, the smart city both as government programme and as private endeavour, needs to grapple with how it will address this if it is to achieve its goals of modernizing India’s urban infrastructure while delivering inclusive urban development (Tripathi, 2015).

Conclusion

This article has reviewed the emergence of the smart cities discourse in India and its use in various political and economic agendas. ‘Smart cities’ in India is an evolving concept, and while key aspects of its emergence are traced here to the end of 2015, all past, present and future conceptualizations of the smart city cannot be contained here. Rather, this article represents an attempt to examine smart cities as a fluid and contested concept and to situate it in debates about socio-political modernization and urban planning and informality, as well as speaking to the experiences and challenges related to smart cities in a comparative context.⁴¹ In India, the idea was initially rooted in an elite-led technomanagerial approach to urban-led development, with capital accumulation and the consolidation of political and economic influence for elites as central. This has been furthered by swirling discourses linking urbanization, industrialization, modernization and ‘technologization’ and may be seen as an Indian version of the ‘developmental state made urban’, where city-making becomes an integral part of nation-building.⁴²

However, the smart cities notion has splintered into contesting public and private conceptions. Some seem to see ‘smartness’ as using ICT for citizens to engage with city government in a more efficient and transparent manner; some see it as using technologies such as GIS mapping to better plan cities; others see it as creating tech hubs and westernized modern cities plugged into the global services economy. Smart cities are envisioned, on the one hand, as greenfield-built, highly connected urban hubs that will compete as international financial and commercial centres with the likes of London, New York and Tokyo. On the other, the current SCM presents a more grounded attempt at integrating technology to improve governance services in Indian cities, and build and improve on the endeavours of JNNURM. The discourse of smart cities and its use by different actors will inarguably continue to evolve, and the extent to which formal, market-driven programmes can address urban informality and deliver inclusive, citizen-centric urban development still remains to be seen.⁴³

Therefore, the evolution of the smart cities discourse and agenda in India reflects the fluidity, contestation and uncertainty in how urban development policy should address the challenges of Indian cities. As it currently stands, the fuzzy nature of the smart cities concept has allowed Modi and political and economic elites to deftly transit from an unworkable campaign pledge of building 100 new cities, to a potentially more valuable (but still challenged) SCM that is far more actionable. Cautiously, however, while greater participation in smart city design is encouraging, if the SCM and other urban development policies heed too closely to neoliberal philosophies and new technocratic epistemologies, India risks encouraging an expansion of corporate urbanism and overlooking the critical need to reform its unsuccessfully decentralized system of urban governance. Without attending to both market and governance systems, it is unlikely smart cities will deliver equitable growth and could further risk entrenching or expanding the power of political and economic elites. Consequently, the problems of equality, justice and sustainability are essential to prioritize in taking the SCM forward. If mindful of this, the SCM can be an important approach to delivering sustainable urban development in this India’s urban century.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rumi Aijaz, Jason Miklian, KK Pandey and N Sridharan for useful discussions and comments related to this article. My thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers whose inputs improved this paper considerably. All errors otherwise remain my own.

Funding

This article was produced as part of the ORF-PRIO research project Urbanising India (URBIN). This research was generously supported by the INDNOR program of the Research Council of Norway.

Notes

References

Aijaz

(2008) Form of urban local government in India. Journal of Asian and African Studies 43(2): 131–154.

Aijaz

Hoelscher

(2015) India’s Smart Cities Mission: An Assessment. ORF Issue Brief 124. Observer Researcher Foundation: New Delhi.

Alawadhi

Aldama-Nalda

Chourabiet

. (2012) Building understanding of smart city initiatives. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7443: 40–53.

Albino

Berardi

Dangelico

(2015) Smart cities: Definitions, dimensions, performance, and initiatives. Journal of Urban Technology 22(1): 3–21.

Anand

Sami

(2015) Urban corridors: Strategies for economic and urban development. International Growth Centre working Paper. Indian Institute of Human Settlements: Bangalore.

Ansari

(2004) Time for a new approach in India. Habitat Debate 10(4): 15.

Appadurai

(2001) Deep democracy: Urban governmentality and the horizon of politics. Environment and Urbanization 13(2): 23–43.

Baka

(2013) The political construction of wasteland: Governmentality, land acquisition and social inequality in South India. Development and Change 44(2): 409–428.

Benjamin

(2008) Occupancy urbanism: Radicalizing politics and economy beyond policy and programs. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 719–729.

10.

Bhan

(2009) ‘This is no longer the city I once knew’: Evictions, the urban poor and the right to the city in millennial Delhi. Environment and Urbanization 21(1): 127–142.

11.

Bhan

(2013) Planned illegalities: Housing and the ‘failure’ of planning in Delhi: 1947–2010. Economic and Political Weekly 48(24): 60–70.

12.

Bhandari

(2015) Smart cities: A brief overview. Introductory statement in handbook to seminar ‘Smart Cities in India: Reality in the Making’, 29 January, Mumbai. Available at: https://aamjanata.com/wp-content/uploads/smart-cities.compressed.pdf (accessed 24 July 2015).

13.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) (2014) Election Manifesto 2014 Highlights. Available at: http://www.bjp.org/en/documents/vision-document/manifesto-2014/manifesto-2014 (accessed 25 November 2015).

14.

Bhattacharya

Sanyal

(2011) Bypassing the squalor: New towns, immaterial labour and exclusion in post-colonial urbanisation. Economic & Political Weekly, 46(31): 41–48.

15.

Bhattacharya

Rathi

(2015) Reconceptualising Smart Cities: A Reference Framework for India. Bangalore: Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP).

16.

Burte

(2014) The ‘smart city’ card. Economic and Political Weekly 49(46): 22–25.

17.

Caragliu

Del Bo

Nijkamp

(2011) Smart Cities in Europe. Journal of Urban Technology 18(2): 65–82.

18.

Chakravorty

(1996) Too little, in the wrong places? Mega city programme and efficiency and equity in Indian urbanisation. Economic and Political Weekly 31(35–37): 2565–2572.

19.

Chatterjee

(2004) The Politics of the Governed. Columbia University Press: New York.

20.

Chatterjee

(2008) Democracy and economic transformation in India. Economic & Political Weekly 43(16): 53–62.

21.

Chaudhuri

(2014). E-governance in India: Interlocking Politics, Technology and Culture. Routledge: Abingdon, UK.

22.

Coe

Paquet

Roy

(2001) E-governance and smart communities a social learning challenge. Social Science Computer Review 19(1): 80–93.

23.

Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) (2013) Smart Cities in Indian Context. CII: New Delhi.

24.

Corbridge

Harriss

(2000) Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy. Polity Press: Cambridge, UK.

25.

Datta

(2012) India’s Eco-city? Urbanisation, environment and mobility in the making of Lavasa. Environment and Planning C 30(6): 982–996.

26.

Datta

(2015) New urban utopias of postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial urbanization’ in the smart city. Dialogues in Human Geography 5(1): 3–22.

27.

Datta

(2016) The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and 100 other utopias in India. In Marvin

Luque-Ayala

McFarlane

(eds) Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision Or False Dawn? Routledge: Abingdon, UK.

28.

Desai

(2012) Governing the urban poor: Riverfront development, slum resettlement and the politics of inclusion in Ahmedabad. Economic and Political Weekly 47(2): 49–56.

29.

Doshi

(2015) Rethinking gentrification in India: Displacement, dispossession and the spectre of development. In Lees

Shin

Lopez-Morales

(eds) Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement. Policy Press: Bristol, UK.

30.

Dupont

(2015) Secured residential enclaves in the Delhi region: Impact of indigenous and transnational models. City, Culture and Society (in press). Epub ahead of print 31 March 2015. DOI:10.1016/j.css.2015.03.004.

31.

Economic and Political Weekly (2010) Private cities. EPW 45(12): 7–8.

32.

Fainstein

(2010) The Just City. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY.

33.

Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI) (2012) FICCI Report on Urban Development in India: Challenges and Opportunities. FICCI: New Delhi.

34.

Follman

(2015) Urban mega-projects for a ‘world-class’ riverfront: The interplay of informality, flexibility and exceptionality along the Yamuna in Delhi, India. Habitat International 45(3): 213–222.

35.

Gabrys

(2014) Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(1): 30–48.

36.

GoI (2004) Mid-Term Appraisal of the Tenth Five Year Plan 2002–07. Planning Commission: New Delhi.

37.

GoI (2012a) Performance Audit of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission. Comptroller and Auditor General of India: New Delhi.

38.

GoI (2012b) Twelfth Five Year Plan: Faster, More Inclusive, Sustainable Growth. Planning Commission: New Delhi.

39.

GoI (2013) Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013. Ministry of Law and Justice: New Delhi.

40.

GoI (2014a) Draft Concept Note on Smart City Scheme (September). Ministry of Urban Development: New Delhi.

41.

GoI (2014b) Draft Concept Note on Smart City Scheme (December). Ministry of Urban Development: New Delhi.

42.

GoI (2015) Smart Cities – Mission Statement and Guidelines. Ministry of Urban Development: New Delhi.

43.

Hollands

(2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? City 12(3): 303–320.

44.

Idiculla

Mathew

(2015) Crafting City Spaces: New Spatial-Legal Regimes in India. Paper presented at the RC21 International Conference on ‘The ideal city: Between myth and reality’. Urbino (Italy) 27–29 August 2015.

45.

Kumar

(2014) E-governance for smart cities. In Kumar

(ed.) E-Governance for Smart Cities. Springer: Singapore.

46.

Kundu

(2007) The future of Indian cities. In Burdett

(ed.) Urban India: Understanding the Maximum City. Urban Age, LSE: London.

47.

Levien

(2012) The land question: Special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3–4): 933–969.

48.

LiveMint (2012) Govt to develop smart cities under JNNURM 2: Kamal Nath. Available at: http://www.livemint.com/Politics/5nIHGRhqqmDGYil4jnarvO/Govt-to-develop-smart-cities-under-JNNURM-2-Kamal-Nath.html (accessed 5 December 2015).

49.

LiveMint (2015) I have no idea what a smart city means: Rahul Mehrotra. Available at: http://www.livemint.com/Politics/VFwRPtdqCtg6lyBeacEfZI/I-have-no-idea-what-a-smart-city-means-Rahul-Mehrotra.html (accessed 5 December 2015).

50.

Mahadevia

(2011) Branded and renewed? Policies, politics and processes of urban development in the reform era. Economic and Political Weekly 46(31): 56–64.

51.

Marvin

Luque-Ayala

McFarlane

(eds) (2016) Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision Or False Dawn? Routledge: Abingdon, UK.

52.

McKinsey Global Institute (2010) India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth. McKinsey, New Delhi.

53.

Miklian

Carney

(2013) Corruption, justice and violence in democratic India. SAIS Review 33(1): 67–49.

54.

Miklian

Hoelscher

(2014) A tale of new cities: The future of urban planning in the developing world. Harvard International Review 36(1): 13–18.

55.

Nam

Pardo

(2011) Conceptualizing smart city with dimensions of technology, people, and institutions. Proceedings of the 12th Annual international conference on digital government research: 282–291.

56.

Narain

(2009) Growing city, shrinking hinterland: Land acquisition, transition and conflict in peri-urban Gurgaon, India. Environment and Urbanization 21(2): 501–512.

57.

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) (2015) Integrated ICT and Geospatial Technologies Framework for 100 Smart Cities Mission. NASSCOM: New Delhi.

58.

Nigam

Menon

(2007) Power and Contestation: India since 1989. Zed: London.

59.

Pandey

(2015) Concept and perspective for Smart Cities. Spatio-Economic Development Record 22(1): 11–13.

60.

Parnell

Pieterse

(2010) The ‘right to the city’: Institutional imperatives of a developmental state. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34(1): 146–162.

61.

Pethe

Nallathiga

Gandhi

Tandel

(2014) Re-thinking urban planning in India: Learning from the wedge between the de jure and de facto development in Mumbai. Cities 39(1): 120–132.

62.

Roy

(2009) Why India cannot plan its cities: Informality, insurgence, and the idiom of urbanization. Planning Theory 8(1): 76–87.

63.

Roy

(2014) Slum-free cities of the Asian century: Postcolonial government and the project of inclusive growth. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35(1): 136–150.

64.

Ruparelia

Reddy

Harriss

Corbridge

(eds) (2011) Understanding India’s New Political Economy: A Great Transformation? Routledge: New York.

65.

Sadoway

Shekhar

(2014) (Re)prioritizing citizens in smart cities governance: Examples of smart citizenship from urban India. Journal of Community Informatics 10(3): online. Available at www.ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/1179/1115. (accessed 31 January 2016).

66.

Sanyal

(2007) Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality & Post-Colonial Capitalism. Routledge: New Delhi.

67.

Shiraz

(2014) Smart cities: An opportunity for changing paradigms of urban planning and citizenship in India. India at LSE Blog. Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/indiaatlse/2014/12/15/smart-cities-an-opportunity-for-changing-paradigms-of-urban-planning-and-citizenship-in-india/ (accessed 24 September 2015).

68.

Shiraz

(2015) The good, bad and ugly of Modi’s urban agenda so far. India at LSE Blog. Available at: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2015/06/05/the-good-bad-and-ugly-of-modis-urban-agenda-so-far/ (accessed 1 December 2015).

69.

Siau

Long

(2005) Synthesizing e-government stage models: A meta-synthesis based on meta-ethnography approach. Industrial Management & Data Systems 105: 443–458.

70.

Sood

(2015) Industrial townships and the policy facilitation of corporate urbanisation in India. Urban Studies 52(8): 1359–1378.

71.

Srivathsan

(2015) A trip down the rabbit hole of Modi’s smart cities wonderland. The Wire, 5 June.

72.

TEDx Talks (2012) Amitabh Kant at TEDx Delhi. Video, 17 December 2012. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BvMybtJ1-E (accessed 30 November 2015).

73.

The Hindu (2012) Govt to develop two smart cities in every state. Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-to-develop-two-smart-cities-in-every-state/article3958133.ece (accessed 25 November 2015).

74.

The Hindu (2015) Cisco to create smart ‘Golden Mile’ on M.G. Road. Available at: http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Vijayawada/cisco-to-create-smart-golden-mile-on-mg-road/article7722653.ece (accessed 25 November 2015).

75.

The Indian Express (2015) Funding for smart cities: Key to coffer lies outside India. Available at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/funding-for-smart-cities-key-to-coffer-lies-outside-india/ (accessed 6 December 2015).

76.

Tripathi

(2015) Do upcoming ‘smart cities’ need to provide smart distribution of higher urban economic growth? Evidence from urban India. MPRA Working paper 61527.

77.

Varshney

(2007) India’s democratic challenge. Foreign Affairs 86(2): 93–106.

78.

Weinstein

(2009) Democracy in the globalizing Indian city: Engagements of political society and the state in globalizing Mumbai. Politics & Society 37(3): 397–427.

79.

Weinstein

Sami

Shatkin

(2014) Contested developments. In Shatkin

(ed.) Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local. Wiley Blackwell: Chichester, UK.