The Socio-political Relevance of the Indian Smart City Mission: ACritical Analysis

Abstract

The world is becoming more and more urbanised by the day. India also is all set to become an urban
majority nation by the mid-twenty-first century. Most of India's urbanisation seems unplanned and
mismanaged leading to a host of social problems like slum extensions, social exclusions, absence of basic
accessibilities with the widespread prevalence of social injustice and the process has been majorly
attributed to migrants from rural areas. Post-independence plans exhibit several instances of correcting
congestions in India's big cities through the creation of alternate absorption points. With this background
in mind, the paper goes on to argue that, the urbanisation of mid-sized cities have proven to be mostly
unimpressive, failing to relieve the big cities, thereby generating a top-heavy structure. It further finds,
through an extensive content analysis that the Smart City Mission was introduced to rid the Indian cities of
its long-pending issues by enabling big cities to accommodate better and most importantly empowering
mid-sized cities to emerge as centres of growth. However, following the tradition of a certain kind of
project-based urbanisation; the mission appears to have inherited vulnerabilities like hierarchical power
structures, inadequate local bodies, the dependence of private players, exploitative market forces and
inter-group and inter-spatial conflicts from its predecessors like the JNNURM. Undoubtedly, the intent
has been to learn from the past but the basic federal structure of governance, the complex socio-spatial
dynamics, the varied stakes and concerned stakeholders causes one to re-think if the mission can entirely
be a success and create cities which can globally be identified as smart