Why you are not getting to see those 100 Smart Cities yet

Apart from these public funded projects cities had also identified about more than 280 PPP projects worth Rs 23,000 Crores by October 2019 out of which 187 worth 15,000 Crores were already completed. 2020 being the Covid year has taken much pace from these projects already and therefore adding to a lot of anxiety like in all walks of life. 

  

 Till October 2019, there were more than 280 Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects worth Rs 23,000 crore were out of which 187 PPP projects worth about 15,000 crore were successfully implemented.

 

So, people often wonder about visibility of these cities. Essentially, they look for an urban skyline that is dotted with glitzy buildings and structures enabled to provide ease of living to the citizens with the help of ICT.  The kind of imagery that got pushed into the psyche of people with the promises made in 2014-15 has gotten stuck on and found very difficult to rid of. Out of the intertwined world of Virtual & physical, while majority of people have started relating more with the virtual and get totally guided by the ‘Maya’ it offers, it’s always the physical world that was likely to get more emphasis and very rightly so. The Indian cities have lacked the kind of investment that they always required to ameliorate their physical infrastructure, which includes your Transport, housing, public parks/squares, water supply & sanitation, waste management, power supply etc.  Possibly the thing that played on undercurrent in getting the public at large getting enamored with a lofty imagery of Smart cities and getting disassociated with the actual plans could be, the absence of participatory spirit by the citizens. Engagement with the citizens though well-established as one of the key features of e-governance but when it came to make a decision around the selection of the projects, yet again it stayed on the drooping shoulders of the Indian bureaucracy. The lack of transparency over selection of the smart city projects got evident from top down approach once again like the entire history of Indian democracy. The Smart City mission once again re-established the centralized model of development with brief being substantially pushed from CMOs or PMO. In most of the cases, citizens remain unaware of the kind of projects that are being undertaken as part of Smart city initiative. Also, the outreach to the citizens got entangled into couple of problems, one, limited digital connectivity and second, deciphering the quality & quantity of responses received.  

 

The administrative model devised for the implementation of Smart city projects also rips open the fault lines between SPVs and existing city municipal/development authorities. My personal interaction with some of the consultants working towards SCM amusingly sight the same reasons as they have been battling with, in all the government projects. The bureaucrats keep shuffling intermittently, causing considerable departure from the ‘concept’ troubles everyone, causing cost & time overruns.  

  

The perspective at the various levels within the City administrative differ largely about the projects undertaken. So, as you go down the hierarchy, people in charge tend to be lot more jittery about practicality and maintenance of the elements of the projects and quite often advocate lowering of the specifications. Team working on these projects get into the fracas of inconsistent ideas across the levels often resulting in inordinate time & cost overruns. Another impedance that is not helping the projects move forward smoothly is the excessive time taken by the bureaucratic set up in review & approval of the project’s blueprints, specifications, cost etc. On the other hand, consultants are allotted much less time in comparison to work on these submittals required for approval. There is hardly any incentive assigned to the bureaucrats for completing the projects within stipulated time as they remain aware all the way that they could be transferred or moved from this assignment anytime without any prior notice. What we have seen so far that even the allotted money returns unspent owing to lack of required progress towards the project’s milestones at the end of every financial year.

 

The Indian state machinery remain entangled in multiplicity of authority which lives on up to its reputation. The number of NOCs that are required to move a piece of urban project continue to remain as high as it used to be always, example, just to advance one piece of metro line within city precincts you need to wander through the labyrinth of City municipality, water supply, underground cables, sewers, optical fibers, private land owners, department of telecom, forest, even armed forces sometimes. The urbanscape of Indian cities remains quite diverse, pluralistic and therefore very complex to deal with. But the good news is, the whole initiative of SCM has brought the discourse around urbanization to the fore which helps reorganize the resources at all the levels. 

 

The smart cities mission came up with a pretty workable funding model with Public funds coming from Centre & State and the balance to be raised by the cities themselves through PPP, municipal bonds, Value Capture Financing, Land/asset monetization etc. The ratio though remain heavily skewed in favour of Public Sources contributing about 70%, Private Investment about 25% and balance 5% coming from debt. The original finance model planned to infuse about 2.05 Lakh Crores in 5 years, Out of which 22.5% was supposed to come from Centre & state each, 21% from Convergence with other Urban regeneration schemes and PPP and the balance was to be raised by the cities themselves. 

 

Reliance over Public sources (Centre + State) grew with the consecutive round of city selections. With the slowing economy beginning 2019 and Covid almost whitewashing the year 2020, prospects of revenue backed Private investment waned fast. It’s being noticed that the dependence over public spending i.e. by the centres and states is increasing among the cities selected in the last couple of rounds. This trend is worrying and a strong indicator of lack in confidence in the current Indian economy. On the other hand, the impetus over public spending, especially on infrastructure projects is going to give a huge fillip to the domestic economy, provided projects are completed within stipulated timeframe. In fact, public spending is one of the sure ways of bringing a slowing economy on track providing large scale employment to people, and what better avenue would it be other than our cities. Though what really concerns in this regard is-by Oct 2019, share released by Centre amounts to about Rs 17,300 crore only, whereas the states’ share released stands at Rs 9,100 crore. This is paltry when compared to the scale of the development and demands quick turn around by all teams involved.

 

Let’s also have a look at the genre of the projects having been selected for Smart City mission. The analysis says the top 5 development sectors which constitute about 80% of the SCM budget for the top 60 cities are Transport, Energy & Ecology, Water & Sanitation, Housing, Economy, Miscellaneous, Governance, Culture & Heritage, Information Technology, Health & Education. Out of these Transport projects occupy the largest chunk, 25% of the overall budget. Under the energy & ecology category we have energy-based projects including renewable energy, gas, metering and distribution that constitute 23.3% of the budget. The IT component of these projects are mostly around smart metering, smart poles and other allied areas. Project under the ecology category lay focus on renewable energy, ecological restoration & miscellaneous environment friendly initiatives. 

 

The third category of projects fall under Water & sanitation category with focus upon Sewerage, Solid waste management, Water Supply, metering & quality control, Water recycling etc. 

  

Even the first tranche of the Smart City Mission projects will have to undergo a few more years in order to have some visible impact. The initial timeline of 2015-19 has only seen partial completion of the projects. Smart City mission is set to provide a once in lifetime opportunity to so many of our cities to build the infrastructure for future. And like other infrastructure projects one must deal with the long gestation periods. The Operation & command centres in more than 50% of the cities having become operational by 2019 one can safely say that the cities have already got the ICT enabled ‘Third eye’. Also, interestingly the shortlisted cities have appointed Data officers in their team who is assigned to collect, curate and offer data-based insights to the city governance. With these critical steps already in place, the rumbling desire of the people to see their cities as Smart beings shall not stay unfulfilled for too long, and despite COVID one may see a lot of impact of this mission by 2023. After all, cities are evolving organisms and unlike many other entities they may never have one or more arrival moment. What Smart City mission has done is, the shortlisted cities have gotten an opportunity to dwell over their SWOT analysis and accordingly plan for future. The smartness quotient as well shall be laid brick by brick.