Book Excerpt: Building The Skeleton Of India’s Smart Cities 

The Covid-19 pandemic that ravaged India with its several waves and subsequent lockdowns has had an adverse impact on the country’s infrastructure sector. It saw many projects being paused, some even shelved, due to a plethora of pandemic-induced reasons. As the sector, which is at the heart of nation-building, slowly picks up pace, falling behind would mean trouble for the country. In their new book India’s Infrastructure Challenges, authors Ashish Gupta and Amir Ullah Khan talk about the current challenges plaguing the infrastructure sector, what certain initiatives like Smart Cities stood for and where they stand, and the way forward for the sector as a whole in the post-pandemic world. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

How using state-of-the-art technologies like internet of things, digital twins to digitise design, planning and implementation of future city projects can make the governmentʼs Smart City. 

How do you define a modern city? Is it just a place where you live an urban ecosystem of infrastructure and services which ensures a decent quality of life to its people? Or is it a living, thriving and evolving organism, which changes its shape, size and structure to accommodate the changing aspirations and needs of its citizens and yet remains resilient enough to survive the most adverse conditions. 

Even a cursory investigation into the character of the modern cities of the 21st century, and those being developed for the future, show a marked tilt towards the second definition, which means that the earlier models of urban planning and development conceived through paper sketches, clay models or even computer- based three-dimensional figures fails to capture the complexity of a vibrant, ever-expanding organism like the city. The change is to make town planning more transparent, inclusive, responsive and efficient for public, planners and developers alike using the digital route digitisation the whole process of design and planning and implementation of city projects, be it is about existing structures or new ones. 

After all, addressing the critical needs of a large and growing population providing them with improved sanitation and waste management facilities, uninterrupted 24x7 water and power supply, efficient and quick transportation, communication, safety, health and a redressal mechanism,̶all within limited amount of resources and funding, calls for a completely new model of planning, implementation and its management using technology as the platform. 

The Indian Governmentʼs approach to the Smart Cities Mission, launched on June 25, 2015, by the Narendra Modi-led Government, hopes to promote cities that “provide core infrastructure and provide a decent quality of life to its citizens, a clean and sustainable environment and the application of smart solutions.” The focus is on “sustainable and inclusive development and the creation of a replicable model which will act like a light house to other aspiring cities not just in India but in various regions of the world,” according to the Smart City Mission statement. The mission, however, makes it abundantly clear that there is no single definition of a “smart city”, thereby providing cities the liberty to define “smartness” according to its own requirements and resources. 

The list of core infrastructure projects for smart cities reads like a laundry list of projects that could become the envy of many cities of the world, a dream outcome for those already living in these cities or even those hoping to migrate to these cities in search of a better life.

The list is long, complex and difficult to implement because of overlapping jurisdiction and will call for a spirit of cooperation between the Centre, states, urban local bodies, non-governmental organisations, citizens and the private sector to make it a success. As Alice Charles, Community Lead, Infrastructure and Urban Development, World Economic Forum, in a paper titled “Harnessing Public-Private Cooperation to deliver the New Urban Agenda,” in October 2016 argues: “Multi-stakeholder cooperation is essential to fill the gap (of capacity and resources) and build transformational strategies to better shape urbanisation outcomes and lead cities towards growth , wellbeing and prosperity for all.” 

The Smart City Mission was started with the government fostering a sense of competition among the states and selected 99 cities after five rounds of bidding̶one city came later and ranked them according to their ability to find innovative solutions to its cityʼs problems and finding adequate funding. The Centre, however, did not discriminate any city based on its ranking, promising `500 crore to every city for five years provided they could find matching grants from the states and urban local bodies (ULBs). The Centre has budgeted`48,000 crore for the mission with a rider that the state governments and urban local bodies chip in an equal amount. “Perhaps the only fiscal advantage for a higher-ranking city was earlier access to government capital,” write Ashwathy Anand, Ajai Sreevatsan and Persis Taraporevala of the Centre for Policy Research in their paper “ An Overview of Smart Cities Mission in India, August 2018.” 

In fact, the first mention of smart cities as greenfield projects can be traced to the BJP election manifesto of 2014, which promised to construct “100 new cities” enabled with the latest in technology and infrastructure adhering to concepts like sustainability, walk to work, and focused on special domains . However, the new smart city mission is focused more on retrofitting and area development projects in existing cities rather than on greenfield and satellite towns, requiring huge capital outlays. 

However, no discussion on the success of these multifarious projects, sometimes with overlapping goals, is possible without realising the enormity of the challenges faced city planners and administrators in making their cities smart, resilient and citizen-centric. Take the case of municipal solid waste management, for instance. More than 377 million urban people live in 7,935 towns and cities and generate 62 million tons of municipal solid waste per annum. And only 43 million ton of that waste is collected, 11.9 million ton is treated and 31 million ton is dumped in landfill sites, according to the website www.smartcitiesindia.com. Such untreated waste not only poses health hazards, creates environmental pollution, but also presents a huge opportunity for the right entrepreneur to convert this waste into wealth. Similarly, according to the Central Pollution Control Boardʼs report of 2013, a total of 53,898 million litres per day (MLD) of sewage is generated by Indian cities and towns and only 36.8% of it is treated, resulting in a huge wastage of a scarce resource because untreated water is unfit for any use. 

Providing piped water supply to 90% of rural households by 2022 too will not be a cake walk either. India consumes 581 trillion litres of water annually. Of this, a staggering 89% is used for irrigation, followed by 7% for households and 4% of industrial use. “Already, 20% of the population lacks clean drinking water and 40% basic sanitation,” argues the Final Report of the Task Force on National Infrastructure Pipeline FY 2019-2020 to FY 2024-25. By 2030, 

Indiaʼs water demand will exceed its supply by two times and the average all-India per capita water availability is expected to touch 1341 cubic meters by 2025 and 1140 cubic meters by 2050. It will be very close to the official threshold for water scarcity of 1000 cubic meters per capita, according to the second round of the Composite Water Management Index (CWMI 2019) developed by the NITI Aayog. The CWMI is actually a tool to assess and improve the performance of efficient management of water resources. 

Even implementing other core infrastructure projects affordable housing, especially for the poor or providing robust Information Technology (IT) connectivity and digitalisation, especially good e-governance and ensuring citizenʼs participation in the affairs of the city̶will be a daunting task. Converting these infrastructure projects into smart solutions will require converting waste into fuel and compost, treating waste water of industries and households for reuse. Installation of smart meters and its effective management, leakage identification and preventive maintenance and monitoring the quality of water, will help in efficient and smart water management. 

Cities that promise uninterrupted and reliable 24x7 electricity supply will require installation of smart meters and its management, and also accelerating the use of renewable sources of energy for a cleaner environment and energy efficient green buildings. For providing effective e-governance, the city administrators will need to set up a public information system, provide a timely grievance redressal system, and ensure the safety and security of its citizens through electronic service delivery and video crime monitoring. 

Clearly, the purpose of the mission, as spelt out by the government mission statement, is to drive economic growth and improve the quality of peopleʼs life by enabling local area development and harnessing the latest technology to ensure smart outcomes. Under the governmentʼs area-based development policy, existing cities will have to be transformed by retrofitting and redeveloping them with new or more efficient infrastructure such as converting slums into better planned areas, to improve the overall quality of life in the cities.

Incidentally, there is a strong complementarity between the smart cities and another one of the governmentʼs flagship programmes, the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT), in terms of achieving urban rejuvenation, with a difference.

While AMRUT follows a project-based approach, the smart city mission follows an area-based approach. 

In fact, the authors of Centre for Policy Research argue that a detailed study of projects proposed by the 60 cities that had won the smart city challenge had much in common with the JNNURM policy with a few additions. The top five development categories are transportation, energy and ecology, water and sanitation, housing and economy, which constitute nearly 80% of the missionʼs budget and are similar to projects undertaken under JNNURM. The other categories IT, governance, heritage and heath are newer additions to the list, but constitute a little under 15% of the funding. 

To accommodate the ever-expanding population migrating into urban areas, new greenfield cities will have to be developed around the cities keeping in mind its unique history and culture like the Gujarat International Finance Tech-City located on the banks of the Sabarmati River. Greenfield developments refer to extensions and will require major investments. As the Final Report of the Task Force on National Infrastructure Pipeline points out that by 2030 an estimated 42% of the Indian population would be urbanised, or living in cities compared to 31% in 2011. “By 2030, it is estimated that five states in India̶Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Punjab will have more than 50% urbanisation.

Also, the number of metropolitan cities in India is estimated to increase from 46% as per 2011 census to 68% in 2030,” notes the report. 

Finally, the mission calls for application of smart solutions by cities through the use of technology, information and data to improve infrastructure and services of the cities or what the mission calls for the pan-city developments. “Comprehensive development in this way will improve the quality of life, create employment and enhance incomes for all, especially the poor and disadvantaged, leading to inclusive cities,” says the report. But that will call for an innovative approach to urban design, planning and implementations, through the use of latest technologies and tools. “Technology advances in cloud platforms, internet of things, artificial intelligence and machine learning have enabled more complex data-based system to evolve such as digital manufacturing, supply 4.0 advance predictive maintenance and smart cities,” says a McKinsey report of August 2015 titled ʻʼDigital Manufacturing: The revolution will be virtualised.” 

(Excerpted from India’s Infrastructure Challenges by Ashish Gupta and Amir Ullah Khan, published by the Centre for Development Policy and Practice, 2022)

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