632089

research-article2016
IAS0010.1177/2233865916632089International Area Studies ReviewHoelscher

Special Issue Article

International Area Studies Review
2016, Vol. 19(1) 2844
The evolution of the smart cities The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/2233865916632089
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Kristian Hoelscher
Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway

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
Indias 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, Indias 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 Indias cities are now the countrys primary engines of economic and
demographic growth, this is threatened by informality, poor infrastructure and inadequate plan-
ning and governance. The underlying implication is that in concert with governance reforms,

Corresponding author:
Kristian Hoelscher, Senior Researcher, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Hausmannsgate 3 0186 Oslo, Norway.
Email: krihoe@prio.no
Hoelscher 29

technical, market-oriented solutions are required to realize Indias 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 communi-
cation technology (ICT) reliance, financing via public private partnerships (PPPs) and private sec-
tor 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, organiza-
tional 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 infrastruc-
tures (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, Modis
election manifesto promised that 100 new cities would be built; yet this position softened follow-
ing 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 Indias wider post-liberalization socio-
economic restructuring, and to the aspirational desire to escape urban informality.3 Initially con-
ceived 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 informal-
ity and the political economy of post-liberalization India. Focusing on an analysis of policy
30 International Area Studies Review 19(1)

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 evolu-
tion, 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 infra-
structure-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 Indias 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 devolu-
tion of power and ineffective urban land acquisition processes (GoI, 2012a; Weinstein etal., 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 Indias urban
informality. Urban governance and basic services are often organized and provided through infor-
mal 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 etal., 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 pol-
icy 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
Hoelscher 31

(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, etal., 2011; Sanyal
2007; Varshney, 2007). As Bhan (2009) notes, contemporary India has been framed by transfor-
mations 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 Indias democratic and economic transfor-
mation 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 gentrifica-
tion strategies. Despite liberal electoral democracy opening opportunities for capital accumula-
tion, 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 Indias cities anew, the oft-referred to McKinsey
Global Institutes (2010) report on Indias urban awakening has been influential in both highlight-
ing the myriad challenges facing Indian cities and reiterating a market-led approach to urban devel-
opment 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 Indias 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 state-
ments 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 stake-
holders 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: 20002009

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 etal., 2001). Policies labelled as smart city in nature have included practices of ret-
rofitting 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
32 International Area Studies Review 19(1)

land for example, Songdo in South Korea, a high tech smart city project dubbed the city of the
future, and also the worlds largest private real estate development.9 Smart cities also tend to focus
on ICT integration in modern urban infrastructures (Alawadhi etal., 2012), though the validity of
both the term and concept has been fiercely challenged (Albino etal., 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 economi-
cally 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 compa-
nies 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 compa-
nies 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: 20092014
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 etal., 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 dis-
course, 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-govern-
ance 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 gov-
ernments 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 Indias 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
Hoelscher 33

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 devel-
opment.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 green-
field projects in Gujarat tied to the DMIC that are proclaimed as the first smart cities in India.
Conceived of between 2007 and 2009, during Modis 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 landowners 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 urbani-
zation 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 DMICs wave of smart city construction offered European com-
panies 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 opportu-
nity to modernize and catch up, investment in existing cities through modern technology was
given high priority.26

Modis 100 new smart cities meets the realities of government: 20142015
This began to shift, however, with Modis 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
34 International Area Studies Review 19(1)

solution to Indias urban challenges. In many respects, the period from early 2014 during Modis
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 Modis 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 Developments Smart Cities Concept Notes of
September and December 2014 (GoI, 2014a, 2014b), offer an insight into the governments chang-
ing 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, Modis 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 industriali-
zation 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 infra-
structure (BJP 2014). Moreover, in his 20142015 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 unlivea-
ble.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 suc-
cessful (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 struc-
tural 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 accu-
mulation 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
Hoelscher 35

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 soci-
etys 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 inclu-
siveness 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 manage-
ment, financing and technological innovation. The governments December 2014 Smart City
Concept Note reminded readers that while capturing (the) aspirations and expectations (of citi-
zens), 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 shift-
ing 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 accumula-
tion, state-citizen power relations and rural livelihoods and capacities in India (Baka, 2013; Levien,
2012; Narain, 2009). Land acquisition processes have hamstrung Modis attempts at industrializa-
tion 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 pro-
gress 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 consul-
tation 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 con-
siderably more difficult and expensive, given the requirements of majority approval for transactions
36 International Area Studies Review 19(1)

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 require-
ments of landowner consent and social impact assessments for forcibly acquired land for develop-
mental 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 pro-
jects, 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: 2015today

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 mil-
lion) 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 govern-
ance 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 pro-
posal (SCP) outlining their suitability for receiving further funding according to a set of crite-
ria 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 guide-
lines 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 differ-
ent levels) and the private sector; the different mechanisms and vehicles used to finance and imple-
ment the mission; and procedures for selection and management of smart city projects. An
Hoelscher 37

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 infrastruc-
ture 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 disad-
vantaged 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 inclu-
sivity. 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 capi-
tal (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 inter-
est 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 interna-
tional 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 reappropri-
ated 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 Ciscos own
38 International Area Studies Review 19(1)

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 assis-
tance of the Singaporean government and construction and design partners. Similar unilateral sign-
ings 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 theo-
rist, Rahul Mehotra, believes that they are founded on capital and investment, but dont 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 Indias 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 gentrifi-
cation 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 uto-
pias, 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 his-
torically 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 Indias urban infrastructure while delivering inclusive
urban development (Tripathi, 2015).
Hoelscher 39

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 conceptual-
izations 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 accumu-
lation and the consolidation of political and economic influence for elites as central. This has been
furthered by swirling discourses linking urbanization, industrialization, modernization and tech-
nologization 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 con-
nected 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 pro-
grammes 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 actiona-
ble. 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 over-
looking 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 eco-
nomic 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 Indias urban century.

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 con-
siderably. 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.
40 International Area Studies Review 19(1)

Notes
1. This is not unique to India. See Nam and Pardo (2011).
2. See Pandey (2015) on the ambiguity of the Indian smart city.
3. See, for example, Menon and Nigam (2007: 83), who considered post reform India as introducing new
economies of desire.
4. The success of these cities under this scheme does vary, however. See Chakravorty (1996) for a discussion.
5. The Planning Commission of Indias working group on urban governance further noted that insignificant
attention has been paid to the unprecedented managerial and policy challenges facing Indian cities
(GoI, 2012a).
6. This system encourages both paying of bribes and the use of influence by both the middle class and elites
to leapfrog bottlenecks in Indias slow, often dysfunctional bureaucracies.
7. I thank an anonymous reviewer for useful suggestions on this point.
8. This is akin to Chatterjee (2004), where the more informal political society acts as an obstacle for the
more formal civil society in post-colonial political economies.
9. See http://songdoibd.com/
10. Interview, Delhi, October 2015.
11. See Kumar (2014) for an outline of the emergence of e-governance in India.
12. Interview, Delhi, October 2015.
13. See also Siau and Longs (2005) summary on the stages of e-governance development.
14. Personal correspondence. Former Secretary of the Ministry of Urban Development, November 2015.
15. While smart cities, SEZs and industrial townships differ in certain ways, each of these new urban geog-
raphies had market-led economic growth as a constitutive characteristic.
16. The project is run as a special purpose vehicle (SPV) in the form of the incorporated Delhi Mumbai
Industrial Corridor Development Corporation (DMICDC). See www.dmicdc.com
17. Others suggest the DMIC has seen limited involvement of the Ministry of Urban Development or coor-
dination between state and local governments, and urbanization was an afterthought to the development
of manufacturing and industrial centres (Anand and Sami, 2015).
18. This broadly has included simplifying regulatory frameworks and legislative systems to encourage
greater flexibility; opening capital markets to mobilize financial resources to facilitate private invest-
ment; removing government subsidies; and decentralizing power to local authorities (Kundu, 2007).
19. Personal correspondence. Former Secretary of the Ministry of Urban Development, November 2015.
20. A former secretary of the Ministry of Urban Development suggested that support existed within the min-
istry for the interlinkage of programmes with physical or conceptual proximity. Personal correspond-
ence, November 2015.
21. Other new cities emerging were labelled as private-, eco- or green-cities, notably the heavily criticized
Lavasa in Maharashtras Western Ghats (Datta, 2012; Miklian and Hoelscher, 2014).
22. See Datta (2016) on Dholera and the smart city as urban utopia.
23. See TEDx Talks (2012) cited in Datta (2015).
24. Interviews, Delhi, October 2015.
25. See the report co-commissioned by Cisco and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII 2013), and more
recently by NASSCOM (2015) co-authored with Accenture.
26. Personal correspondence. Former Secretary of the Ministry of Urban Development, November 2015.
27. Interview, Delhi, October 2015.
28. Available at http://indiabudget.nic.in/budget20142015/bspeecha.asp. Accessed 18 November 2015.
29. See GoI (2015).
30. In addition to funds from the centre, state and municipal authorities are also charged with raising matched
funds.
31. While heralded by the government as a fresh new approach, AMRUT is essentially a repackaging of
JNNURM focusing on urban infrastructure and upgrading of urban basic services, with a slightly greater
emphasis on decentralization of power to the states.
32. The SCM states that it will prioritize the use of technology, information and data to make infrastructure
and services better and using smart technologies for the development of the poor and marginalized will
be an important part of the Proposal (GoI, 2015: 21).
Hoelscher 41

33. The absence of policy in the SCM was also lamented, with the mission likened to a funding programme
without vision.
34. Candidate cities were described as all looking to Barcelona, a highly referenced smart city success.
35. Interviews, Delhi, October 2015. See also Bhattacharya and Rathi (2015).
36. Interviews, Delhi, October 2015. In discussing this, one interviewee was sceptical, saying that at a
conference in a particular candidate city, the room of educated elites was given a one-page Citizen
Engagement Campaign questionnaire to fill out by a ward councillor of the city. The interviewee was
told that this group of middle and upper classes was typical of citizens consulted in the city, and while
most wards in the city would be covered, there were almost no attempts to engage the opinions of the
poor in those wards. In his words, these approaches are widely followed among candidate cities and
that the flawed citizen consultation process equates to exclusion by design. Even if this is not com-
monplace, it still reflects the discrepancies between the discourse and practice of consultation in smart
city development.
37. To this end, Fainsteins (2010) treatise on The Just City shows how inclusion and justice in the city are
eroded by neoliberal growth, which is largely incompatible with citizen-centred ideals of equity, democ-
racy and diversity. From this perspective, it is arguable then whether simply consulting citizens about
their opinions on a proposed plan of action can fully deliver such rights and deeper inclusion in Indias
urban future.
38. Ciscos blueprint is its own ideal template of the Indian smart city replete with ICT services enabled
by the company. See http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?articleId=1492392. Accessed 25
November 2015.
39. Andhra Pradesh will lose its former capital, Hyderabad, to the new state of Telegana when the arrange-
ment to share Hyderabad as joint capital lapses in 2024.
40. Gabrys here reworks Foucaults notion of environmentality to consider the role of smart cities in spa-
tialmaterial distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of
life (Gabrys 2014: 30).
41. On this point, see a range of useful contributions in Marvin etal. (2016).
42. See Parnell and Pieterse (2010).
43. Despite the SCM drawing headlines, the focus may arguably be on the wrong mission if seeking to
promote sustainable and inclusive urban development. As Shiraz (2015) notes, although fragmented, the
combined impact of continued deepening of political institutions of decentralization and participation
through AMRUT along with social inclusion offer an incremental, stable and safe (non-risky) pace of
urban development (Shiraz, 2015: np).

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