Smart Cities Mission 2025: With the Smart Cities Mission nearing its end on March 31, the question facing the 100 cities that were part of the project is, how ‘smart’ are their cities? A status check from Agra, the city of the Taj.
Around 10 km separates Agra’s Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) from the narrow lanes of Tajganj, the historic neighbourhood next to the Taj Mahal.
Though the two share little in common — the ICCC with its wall of screens displaying seemingly every datapoint the city creates in real time, from traffic challans to the amount of garbage collected, and Tajganj with its gaping potholes, open drains and overhead wires — a prominently displayed logo gives away their bond: both are part of Agra Smart City Ltd.
Nearly a decade ago, Agra was chosen as one of the 100 cities selected by the Centre for its flagship urban development scheme, the Smart Cities Mission. The city had ranked third in the national Smart Cities Awards in 2023, behind Indore and Surat. As the Mission nears its end on March 31, nearly 10 years since it started, the question facing the selected municipal corporations is, how ‘smart’ are their cities? And with the Rs 48,000 crore Central funding earmarked for the project almost over, where do the cities go from here?
The launch of the Mission
Ahead of the 2014 general elections, then Gujarat chief minister and the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, had at an election rally in January pitched the idea of developing “100 new cities”.
“Kyun na hamare desh mein 100 naye sheher bane? Adhunik sheher bane, walk-to-work concept ke roop mein bane, smart city bane (Why can’t 100 new cities be developed in India? Modern cities, smart cities based on the walk-to-work concept should be developed),” he had said.
Soon after Modi took charge as Prime Minister in 2014, work on making his idea into a scheme of the government began.
Those involved with the early planning recalled that the idea went from creating 100 new greenfield cities to developing existing cities into smarter versions and setting up a few new ones. The Cabinet approved Central funding of Rs 48,000 crore for 100 cities, with each expected to get Rs 100 crore annually for five years. States would have to match the Centre’s share and additional funds could be brought in by the cities through public-private partnerships.
The Smart Cities Mission was finally launched on June 25, 2015. The 100 cities were selected in several rounds of competition from January 2016 to June 2018, with each city submitting its proposal for projects to be undertaken.
What was meant to be a five-year mission for each city, is now set to end on March 31 after three extensions. While each city had its own list of priorities, all of them implemented the ICCC project, at a total cost of Rs 11,775 crore, according to the MoHUA’s Smart Cities Mission dashboard.
An integrated command centre
Agra, which was selected in the third round in September 2016, too, completed 62 projects worth Rs 2,369 crore. Among them was the construction, operation and maintenance of the ICCC. With a staff of 30, including engineers and customer relations managers, the ICCC is the nerve centre for the city.
Live feeds from the over 1,530 CCTV cameras installed under the Mission, GPS updates from garbage trucks and dumpsites, and citizens’ complaints received through the Mera Agra app, phone lines and social media all converge at the modern command centre.
Saurabh Agrawal, chief data officer, SPV, Agra Smart City Ltd, says the command centre, set up at a cost of Rs 282 crore, started operations in 2020. From pollution monitoring to property tax, traffic challans and door-to-door garbage collection, 14 services have been integrated.
“By tracking the movement of garbage trucks through the GPS and monitoring in real time from the ICCC, we have been able to reduce the diesel consumption by 15,000 litres a month,” he says.
At the ICCC, the dashboard displayed on a wall of screens shows the amount of garbage picked up in real time. Garbage bins have also been linked to the ICCC. When a bin is about to be filled, an alert goes out and the sanitation department is activated to empty it. Agrawal says the system of alerts, coupled with biometric attendance for municipal workers, has improved the delivery of basic services.
The AI-enabled cameras also throw up alerts when stray cattle or dogs are spotted on the streets or if there is a pile of garbage on a road. The automatic number plate reader cameras show a range of traffic rule violations, from two-wheeler riders without helmets to car drivers not wearing seatbelts. A list of “top offenders”, with their offences and number plates, flash on the dashboard. While the ICCC monitors traffic lights and violations, the system is integrated with the police control room as the police issue challans in case the violations are verified.
But now, with the Mission coming to an end, Agra, like other cities, is trying to increase its sources of revenue to keep the ICCC going. In February, Agrawal says, the ICCC started offering members of the public a 30-minute viewing of CCTV footage for payment of Rs 100 in case of an incident. This, he says, earned the Agra Smart City Rs 30,000 in its first few days.
Sonali, a customer relations manager at the ICCC, recalled a recent incident. A family whose dog had been missing approached the ICCC asking for the CCTV footage of the area where the incident happened. They managed to track down the car in which their dog was taken away. “Their Bhabhi (sister-in-law) had taken the dog. The family came and distributed sweets here,” Sonali says.
In Tajganj, it’s a different story. Bablu, a vegetable shop owner, says water and sewer lines were laid in parts of Tajganj as part of the Mission. “But water supply is hardly available for a couple of hours a day. And the sewerage, you can see for yourself,” he says, pointing to the clogged, open drains outside his shop.
Chetan Arora, a shop owner and founder of the Tajganj 500 metres Market Association, says: “There is a lack of maintenance. The municipal corporation has done some work, but they have not made the people aware of how to maintain and keep the area clean.”
Nearby, in a municipal educational institution that was spruced up as a part of the mission, there is a similar list of complaints – non-functional projectors in the ‘smart classrooms’, a “smart toilet” lying locked, a faulty RO water plant and a worn-out sports court. However, the walls are painted bright and the Agra Smart City logo is prominent.
When reached for a comment, Agra Municipal Corporation Commissioner Ankit Khandelwal said the smart classrooms and smart toilets were handed over to the municipal corporation only a few months ago, after the original operation and maintenance contracts under the mission ended.
Agrawal, the chief data officer, admits that there have been some challenges. “In the Budget we had, we could only cover so much, but people think that the whole of Agra is a smart city. They ask where the smart city is when they see their own areas.”
As per the Mission guidelines, Agra, and the other Smart Cities, were divided into two sections for the execution of the mission: technology-driven initiatives that were meant to be rolled out city-wide, and area-based development (ABD) plans as part of which local infrastructure projects were executed in a selected locality in the city. In Agra, for instance, while intelligent traffic management, solid waste management and other municipal service projects were rolled out citywide, the ABD plan was executed only in Tajganj, the area around the Taj Mahal. Each city chose the area to be covered under ABD — Jaipur, for instance, selected its historic Walled City. Even within the ABD plan, not all streets or parts of the locality got all the projects. For instance, in Agra, around 250 households in the low-lying areas of Tajganj were connected to the vacuum-based sewerage network where the conventional gravity-based systems did not work; but other parts of the same locality were not. This, according to officials, was due to the limited funds and the lack of feasibility of laying a sewerage network in close proximity to the protected monument.
The road ahead
Going forward, says Agarwal, the Union government should give the better performing cities viability gap funding to continue their ICCCs and other Smart Cities projects.
As of now, the MoHUA is yet to announce any plans for the existing 100 SPVs and whether they would be given any funds beyond March 31 to continue operations.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) did not respond to requests for comment on the status and future of the mission and the infrastructure created.
Dr Debolina Kundu, Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, a MoHUA-funded think tank, says the Rs1-lakh crore Urban Challenge Fund announced in the Union Budget this year could be what comes next.
Srikanth Viswanathan, CEO of the Bengaluru-based non-profit Jaanagraha that works on urban governance, said the Smart Cities Mission rightly focused on area-based development of key areas and giving cities more of a say in what they wanted from the mission.
“The idea of area-based development of certain key areas of the city is an important agenda. Like London did for the Canary Wharf area. Getting the city to say what it wants, rather than the Central mission telling it what to do, was refreshing,” he said.
However, he says, the idea fell short in terms of implementation. “SPVs ended up becoming an extension of the state or urban local government. The main objective of the SPVs was to corral private capital, which did not happen,” he said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Damini Nath
Quelle/Source: The Indian Express, 31.03.2025
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