India’s Smart Cities Mission wants to transform urban areas into high-tech hubs
India’s Smart Cities Mission wants to transform urban areas into high-tech hubs
But who will benefit most from this drive towards a smarter future?
Crowded, dirty and chaotic, cities in India have traditionally suffered a bad press. Nobody would dispute that major conurbations such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata are charismatic treasure troves of history and culture. But anyone who has choked on traffic fumes while trying to negotiate crumbling pavements teeming with people, will attest to their dysfunctional nature.
Yet while India’s urban centres can be hard to love, they are key to the future economic health of the world’s second most populous nation.
Urbanisation continues to occur at a breakneck pace. As people flood in from the countryside in search of better opportunities, India’s urban population is expected to grow by 250 million to 590 million people by 2030.
Such formidable numbers call for drastic measures. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is going further than ever before to set the urban development agenda through its ambitious Smart Cities Mission.
“The Government aims to develop cities into engines of growth, while improving the quality of life of its citizens,” comments Anshuman Magazine, chairman of India and South East Asia at CBRE. “It is therefore imperative to develop and promote these urban centres to support and sustain urbanisation in the long run.”
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The initiative aims to change the face of 98 of India’s fast-growing urban centres – turning the cities into tech-driven, sustainable entities where land is maximised through forward-thinking projects — and the central government has allocated an estimated USD7.5 billion to the Mission.
Earlier this year the government announced a list of 20 smart cities out of the 98 shortlisted. These 20 cities, which include major hubs such as Chennai and Jaipur as well as less vaunted centres like Belagavi in the southern state of Karnataka and Ludhiana in Punjab, will be the first to receive funding under the scheme, thus kick-starting the process of developing them into “smart cities”.
The plan is to turn these sprawling, unwieldy and often poor cities into urban centres, which are highly advanced in terms of infrastructure, sustainable real estate, communications and market viability. Information technology will be the principle infrastructure and the basis for providing essential services to residents.
The development of these cities will take place through the adoption of a pan city initiative as part of one of three “area-based development” strategies: “retrofitting, redevelopment and greenfield”, as noted in a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report titled “Reforms to Accelerate the Development of India’s Smart Cities Shaping the Future of Urban Development & Services”
Retrofitting will see an existing area developed by adopting smart solutions, redevelopment will see an existing derelict area redeveloped from a built environment perspective and greenfield will see a vacant area developed using innovative planning, plan financing and plan implementation.
Although the central government is putting significant monetary heft behind its plan, the idea is to turn the country’s “smart cities” into major engines of economic growth with private enterprises like property development companies and information technology firms expected to contribute, and thus prosper, significantly.
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It is hardly surprising that key players in India’s real estate industry are widely receptive to the initiative.
“Real estate is directly related to infrastructure and the economic development of a nation,” says Shaishav Dharia, Regional CEO of Lodha Group, one of India’s most prominent developers. “Smart Cities will further improve prevailing infrastructure and lead to the evolution of real estate markets in the cities.”
“This initiative can be a game changer,” adds Magazine of CBRE. “It can stimulate economic development and also improve the quality of life for millions of Indians. The development of these Smart Cities in India will provide significant opportunities for real estate development firms. Realty players will need to focus and strategise on the development of technology-driven homes, while also keeping affordability in mind.”
Not everyone is singing from the government’s hymn-sheet however. Critics of the scheme say that the utopian vision laid out by supporters of the initiative has its fair share of smoke and mirrors.
They claim that proposals from a majority of the smart cities are focused on developing small areas rather than entire cities. This, they say, will benefit a small, mostly middle and upper class, percentage of the population.
Many are also wary about the government’s willingness to open the door to wholesale privatisation of urban areas, saying it may put a premium on civic services and increase – not reduce – inequality.
“If the government is successful in getting private investors onboard, it means that civic services would necessarily be on payment basis, not tax-financed – which means that those who can’t afford to pay can’t access the service or might only be able to access a degraded version of it,” says G Sampath, a Delhi-based columnist for The Hindu newspaper. “Would that qualify as successful implementation of the smart city initiative? If you are thinking only of the rich, upper-, middle-class segment and foreign investors, maybe yes.”
Other challenges, meanwhile, include traditionally poor collaboration among planning and administrative bodies within cities, archaic processes and insufficient capacity — a lack of technical expertise in Urban Local Bodies (ULBs).
Earlier this year, traffic came to a grinding halt in Gurgaon in the state of Haryana during the monsoon rains. Although it is not on the shortlist of smart cities, it is a hub for tech and one of India’s most advanced cities. With drivers stuck on waterlogged roads for up to 16 hours, some took to Twitter to voice their frustration.
“This monster jam is a reminder that we need basic cities before we need smart cities,” one said.
A cradle of civilisation, India has often revelled in anarchy. With backing from the public sector and private businesses, smart cities are on the horizon. Even so, it’s inevitable that the route to improved urban environments will encounter a few bumps along the way.
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Source: Property Report