An Appraisal of the 100 Smart Cities’ Mission In India: Lessons For Post-Pandemic Urban Future

The Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India has been widely discussed in literature since its launch in 2015 due to the scale and complexity involved in digitally transforming as many as 100 cities. The COVID-19 pandemic further fueled this discourse, as these cities rapidly assembled Smart Operations Centers (SOCs) to support integration and monitoring under a unified platform. Drawing on an extensive quantitative assessment of 100 city plans under the SCM, encompassing 5,300 projects developed over six years, this study uncovers emerging gaps between smart city design aspirations and actual implementation trajectories. We examine how these large-scale digitization efforts through SOCs impact long-term governance capacities and the spatial and social repercussions of these developments. The findings suggest that rapid smart city infrastructure deployments in India are not supported by equitable design, and the piecemeal technologies and institutional re-alignments pose barriers to holistic urban transformation.