The Smart Cities Mission not only prioritises parts of a city over the whole but also truncates the role of local city governments.
The Narendra Modi government would be celebrating a year of the launch of its flagship urban programme, the Smart Cities Mission, this month. In January, 20 from a pool of 100 cities were selected by the Central government under the Smart Cities Mission. Aimed at allocating Rs.10 billion to each selected city over a span of five years (Central government funding of Rs.5 billion, matched with equal funding from States/local bodies), the mission has been claimed by Venkaiah Naidu, the Minister for Urban Development, as a “first in the country and even in the world [where] investments in urban sector are being made based on competition-based selection of cities”.
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No framework for development
First, the Central government incentivising development of a small area and not the entire city doesn’t augur well. Explicitly, the Smart Cities Mission is aimed at land monetisation. Indeed, one of the big issues of our cities is that land, as a resource, hasn’t been fully exploited. The mission is arguably trying to articulate this particular aspect of our cities — that is, to suggest that land monetisation has not been addressed and there needs to be some thinking on this. One of the ways of doing this is to begin a project-based development, something that the mission proposes. But to present a land monetisation plan in the garb of national urban policy and encourage it as a model for the entire city is inappropriate and deeply worrying.
Second, the mission also fails to articulate an institutional framework for urban development — a sustainable blueprint for governance for our cities — on two counts.
The first is convergence. There are multiple policies for urban India: the Swachh Bharat Mission which is gearing up to make urban areas clean; Housing for All which promises universal housing by 2022; the National Urban Livelihoods Mission; the National Urban Information System; and the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana (HRIDAY). Additionally, there are multiple infrastructure projects like expansion of city roads and highways, water reservoir and storage-related development which are mostly undertaken by development authorities or the State governments. The Smart Cities Mission’s convergence with all these schemes is not known.
The second is governance. During the launch of the mission last year, Mr. Modi said, “The decision to make the city smart should be taken by the city, its citizens and its municipalities.” Ironically though, in the guidelines for the mission, the role of the local governments was significantly cut short — delegating the decision-making powers to a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), a body to be set up and which would implement the mission. The purported lack of capacities in our city government is arguably the rationale for the creation of an SPV. But is an SPV the right institutional architecture for our urbanisation and city development?
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Bhanu Joshi is a public policy researcher at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi.