OPINION | India's Smart Cities: How smart are they really?

When the Smart Cities Mission was launched in June 2015, it carried the promise that technology could help Indian cities leapfrog decades of congestion, flooding, uncollected garbage, and decaying public infrastructure. Eleven years on, and a year and a half after the Mission formally closed on March 31, 2025, the ledger looks impressive. Data compiled by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs shows that by March 31, 2026, 7,790 of the 8,064 projects taken up had been completed, accounting for about ₹1.56 lakh crore of the ₹1.65 lakh crore sanctioned. Cities have claimed ₹47,458 crore of the ₹48,000 crore central allocation. Official figures record more than 83,000 CCTV cameras, over 17,000 km of water supply network under SCADA monitoring, some 1,700 km of smart roads, and an Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) in every one of the 100 cities.

Completion rates measure what was built. They say little about whether a resident of Kochi, Agra, or Srinagar finds the daily commute shorter, the monsoon less disruptive, or a civic complaint more likely to be resolved. That is the yardstick citizens apply, and it is the one against which the Mission has yet to be judged.

Building capability, delivering outcomes

India has created technological capacity at a scale few would have predicted in 2015. The ICCCs were designed to bring traffic, water, waste, public safety, and disaster information onto a common platform. Impact studies commissioned under the Ministry's own assessment programme report gains. An IIM Bangalore study associated smart classrooms with a 22 per cent rise in enrolment between 2015-16 and 2023-24 across the 19 cities that reported data, and a companion study on women's safety reported a 14 per cent drop in overall crime in Nagpur after surveillance systems were deployed. These are encouraging findings, though they are associations drawn from studies the Ministry commissioned, and they would carry more weight if independently replicated.

Such gains also last only as long as the systems behind them are maintained. A camera that is not serviced does not make a street safer, and an app that routes a complaint into an unanswered queue does not improve governance. The value of the technology is decided in the years after the inauguration, which is precisely the phase Indian cities have now entered.

Kochi: One city, many agencies

Kochi, selected in the first round in January 2016, illustrates both sides of the ledger. Cochin Smart Mission Limited (CSML) oversaw the replacement of about 40,400 streetlights with LEDs, a ₹40 crore project designed to reduce the Corporation's electricity and maintenance costs, with five years of operation and maintenance built into the contract. That is a tangible and measurable gain.

Residents know that the city's daily problems lie elsewhere: congestion at Vyttila and Palarivattom, roads that turn into channels in a heavy shower, footpaths that vanish mid-stretch, uneven waste management, and a chronic shortage of parking. Even the streetlight programme ran into a familiar coordination problem in 2024, when highway works damaged underground cables and the Corporation and the NHAI differed over responsibility for restoring them. In a 2025 order on the city's waterlogging, the Kerala High Court held that piecemeal action by multiple agencies cannot substitute for a unified drainage strategy.

Many of these problems predate the Mission and cut across the Corporation, the GCDA, the Kerala Water Authority, KMRL, the NHAI, and several state departments. That is the heart of the matter. A citizen stuck in traffic or wading through a flooded street experiences one city, while our governance still operates as several. If a decade of investment could not bring these agencies to work as one system, Kochi has acquired smart components without becoming a smart system.

Smart enclaves

A Centre for Policy Research analysis found that Area-Based Development covered only about 7 per cent of the average city's area, while receiving around 80 per cent of smart city funding and serving about 9 per cent of its population. A smart road that ends at the project boundary does not shorten the journey beyond it, and a drainage upgrade in one ward cannot cure flooding that originates elsewhere in the basin. The Special Purpose Vehicle model also raised a harder governance question: how should project decisions made by company boards be reconciled with the accountability of elected municipal councils envisaged under the 74th Constitutional Amendment?

Citizens as participants

The people who use a road every day know where pedestrians cannot cross, which streets flood first, and where buses stall. Parents, shopkeepers, senior citizens, and persons with disabilities hold similar knowledge about their neighbourhoods. That is urban data of the most valuable kind, and technology should amplify it. A citizen-centred city would involve residents in defining the problem before a project begins, in checking whether the solution works during execution, and in assessing whether daily life improved after completion. Consultation held after the major decisions are taken is a formality. Participation must also run through ward committees and residents' associations, since purely digital channels exclude many elderly and economically weaker residents. To be fair, citizen engagement was built into the Mission from the beginning, through consultations during the preparation of Smart City Proposals and through Smart City Advisory Forums. The question is whether that participation remained meaningful once projects moved from planning to execution, operation, and maintenance.

The command centre as critical infrastructure

The ICCC is the Mission's most important technological legacy, and its next stage should move from displaying problems to anticipating them. During heavy rainfall in Kochi, a mature system would combine IMD forecasts, real-time drain levels, traffic flows, and historical flood maps to warn residents in vulnerable wards, reroute traffic, and dispatch municipal teams before the water rises.

A second dimension receives far too little attention. Each ICCC now aggregates live video, water SCADA, traffic signals, and citizen data for an entire city, which makes it critical information infrastructure in all but name. A command centre whose vendor contract has lapsed, whose software is no longer patched, and whose trained operators have moved on is both a wasted asset and an exposed one. Every ICCC needs periodic security audits, a clearly designated Data Fiduciary responsible for personal data processing, and an exit plan that prevents lock-in to a single vendor's proprietary platform.

After the Mission

The Mission closed financially on March 31, 2025 with no further budgetary outlay. In June 2025, the Ministry issued an advisory urging states to repurpose the SPVs for technology support, project implementation, and investment facilitation, together with a roadmap for the continued functioning of ICCCs. Implementation has been uneven. Chandigarh wound up its smart city company in March 2025 and handed projects to line departments. In Nagpur, the ICCC, CCTV network, and smart traffic systems are passing to the municipal corporation, which must now meet their recurring costs from its own budget. In Kochi, CSML is winding down with the redevelopment of the spaces beneath the Vyttila and Palarivattom flyovers undecided, a ₹30 crore plaza and walkway project caught in the transition, and the full rollout of the ParKochi smart parking system delayed.

Who pays for electricity, bandwidth, storage, software upgrades, and hardware replacement over the next decade is a question of public money and public accountability. It should be answered before a multi-crore system quietly stops working.

What comes next

The government's answer is the ₹1 lakh crore Urban Challenge Fund approved by the Union Cabinet in February 2026. Running from 2025-26 to 2030-31, it will meet 25 per cent of project costs, require at least half to be raised through municipal bonds, bank loans, or public-private partnerships, and select projects competitively on outcomes such as revenue, jobs, safety, and cleanliness. The emphasis on outcomes corrects one weakness of the Smart Cities Mission, and market financing should impose a discipline on project design that grant funding did not.

The risk is that the new fund repeats the old pattern of rewarding fresh construction while the assets of the last mission decay. One condition would make a substantial difference. Any city seeking Urban Challenge Fund support should first demonstrate a funded operations and maintenance plan, a recent security audit, and public performance data for the smart infrastructure it already holds.

A new yardstick

Success should be published, independently verified, and measured in commuter time saved, hours of waterlogging avoided, water actually conserved, waste processed rather than merely collected, complaint resolution times, and the share of residents who use the systems built for them. Citizens are entitled to know what their city achieved as well as what it spent.

The first decade showed that India can build smart infrastructure at scale. The next must show that it can keep that infrastructure working, make agencies act as one city, and give residents a seat when priorities are set. The real test of a smart city is an ordinary monsoon Tuesday, when a resident tries to reach work on time, a child walks to school, and a complaint lodged in the morning is acted upon by evening. On that test, Indian cities have made a start, and most of the work remains.

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)

(The writer is a former National Cyber Security Coordinator and a former Signal Officer-in-Chief of the Indian Army.)