FRAMEWORK TO MANAGE GOVERNANCE OF SMART CITY DEVELOPMENT IN INDIA

Abstract

The world urban population will rise to 6.4 billion by 2050, from 3.6 billion in 2011 (Lange, 2010). India’s urban population stands at 31% that increased from a mere 6.2% in 1951, as per census 2011 (Biswas & Maurya, 2018). UNFPA predicts India’s urban population at 40.7 % (590 million) by 2030 (UNFPA, 2007). The growth in urban population will be in combination with natural growth and migration from rural to urban. It implies more transition of people from rural to urban settings (Biswas & Maurya, 2018). However, rapid development might result in more slums and unplanned urbanisation if the status quo remains. Urban areas are considered as the centres of productivity and growth. The share of the urban sector in the Indian GDP was 29 per cent in 1950-51, which increased to 75 per cent at present (Bhagat, 2014). Urbanisation is inevitable and taking place rapidly to support the economy, so as requires equal development in the social sector. Multi-pronged problems and obstacles (like the increasing rate of unemployment and poverty) result in the growth of slums and informal settlements in urban areas. The erstwhile Planning Commission of India set out to create Smart Cities to tackle the urbanisation challenges during the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012 – 2017). Smart cities were introduced as development drivers in the twelfth plan, vying for investment to increase infrastructure. This flagship project of the government of India progressed from conceptualisation to the process of execution, along with the growing concerns about the policy. Debates on implementation have gained momentum as experts argued for a closer examination of the factors involved and the need to integrate lessons from previous initiatives. Significant uncertainty about the limited organisational capacity of the Indian municipal local bodies' to meet the challenges was hindering the possibilities of implementing a new kind of urban solutions. These concerns well-performing the urban planning analysis, published by the government of India. The analysis identified political-economic dynamics and insufficient management capability as the primary problems affecting India's successful urban reform. Various well-regarded global organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF, 2016) and the Brookings Institution (McKinsey, 2014) assessed the Smart City development in India. The assessment highlighted that the concept of a planned urban administration was yet to be addressed (Praharaj, Han, & Hawken, 2018a). The current nature of government silos would pose a significant challenge in the implementation of mega future developments. The challenge for governance is to overcome the deficiencies in infrastructure by taking advantage of the economic momentum created by the urbanisation process in the urban area (Biswas & Maurya, 2018). On a promising note, India is also trying to adapt its governance system to manage the haphazard urbanisation. The institutional control and organisational set up are essential to establish an order in this development process. SCM has objectives to develop essential services for improvement in economic growth and quality of life by harnessing technology as a mean to create smart solutions for citizens. The urban local government (Municipal Corporations, Municipalities and Municipal Councils) used to provide most of these services, before the SCM. SPVs are companies formed for a specific purpose in a time-bound mode. SPVs are working in some cities (20 lighthouse cities, selected in the first round of SCM challenge) since 2015. Urban population, the number of statutory towns in the state, and preparedness towards the smart city were the criteria for selection of aspiring smart cities. The mission started with a period of 5 years. Some cities did well towards the smart city development, and others are still struggling to find the right mechanism to work. The new service delivery mechanism (SPV) is still adapting and competing with the traditional system. There have been some positives as well as some criticism for SPVs in comparison to the traditional system. The research discusses the historical context, functioning module, the establishment, authenticity and the legal support of SPVs’ constitution. The research argues about the achievements of the SPVs over the traditional governance process and global best practices with the help of governance analysis methods. The method for investigation includes developing a framework with the governance principles defined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and measurement parameters. The governance systems’ performance can be measured/ranked by this framework. Analysing the results gives the nodal points where a particular system is better than the other and the highlighting features, those can be incorporated to develop an alternative comprehensive system. This research is an attempt to evaluate the development process of these aspiring smart cities in comparison to the traditional development process with the help of Urban Governance Indexing (UGI) and Governance simulation. UGI is a tool developed by the UN-Habitat for the assessment of urban governance systems. The primary database for the analysis is secondary data and semi-structured interviews of officials. City selection criteria for this analysis are the cities’ progress done towards smart city development and phase-wise selection of cities. Bhubaneswar was the winner of the smart city challenge, and Pune was the leading city at the time of first evaluation. Another criterion was to include cities from different states of India because states have their independent guidelines for the traditional process of city development. The cases selected for the analysis are cities from different states of India and some leading global cities in smart city development. The research compares the Indian traditional city development processes, SCM mechanism and leading city development processes around the world. The selected Indian cities are Bhubaneswar, Delhi, Pune, Surat, and Varanasi. Global cities are London, New York, and Johannesburg. The research finds that SPVs has been used for a small pilot area of the cities. Enlarging the SPV mechanism to the level of local government may translate into a similar type of governance system. The new development process for the Smart Cities Mission is still developing, and for now, the traditional method of development is found to be marginally better than the new mechanism. The analysis of existing governance suggests that smart cities development needs a more efficient and converged implementation mechanism. Data availability is one of the limitations of the research. Since the smart city concept is very new to Indian city development process, finding similar cases is another limitation. The author simulated the existing governance system as well as the proposed governance framework for Indian cities. Therefore, the research outcome (framework) can be readily implementable in practical for the smart cities’ development. The research is an original work (data collection, data analysis, interpretation and in every way possible). To the best of author’s knowledge, the research is among the very first effort to analyse and compare between the two governance systems.