CITYZEN. Some not-so-smart ideas

The Budget numbers for urban development tell an interesting story of enthusiasm overwhelming realism. The emphasis on smart cities in the rhetoric of Arun Jaitley’s first Budget last year was backed by the economic muscle of the government, with the allocations for the ministry of urban development being much more than double the actual expenditure in the previous year. But it was soon clear that that enthusiasm was not matched by clarity about what needed to be done. The Revised Estimates for the year now indicate that more than a third of the allocation could not be spent.

Undeterred by that stumble, Jaitley has once again budgeted for urban expenditure in 2015-16 that is more than 50 per cent higher than the Revised Estimates for 2014-15. And the ministry should be in a better position to meet its targets this year. It is well on its way to making the transition from the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission of the previous government to its own initiatives. The Budget does retain the combined head of 100 smart cities and JNNURM, but the allocation has dropped dramatically from ₹7,016.8 crore to a minimal ₹143.05 crore.

In purely financial terms, the main thrust of the new urban strategy would appear to be the Urban Rejuvenation Mission for 500 habitations with an allocation of ₹3,919 crore. A judgment on what can be achieved with an investment of less than ₹8 crore per habitation must await details on what exactly is being planned. What is bound to attract greater attention is the creation of a separate mission for 100 smart cities with an allocation of ₹2,020 crore. Here again, some weight must be given to the argument that an allocation of less than ₹20 crore per Smart City is underwhelming. And this is not helped by the Government’s current thinking on what constitutes a Smart City.

The much revised official concept note defines smart cities as “those cities which have smart (intelligent) physical, social, institutional and economic infrastructure while ensuring centrality of citizens in a sustainable environment”. The resources required are clearly much greater than what can be allocated. And the effectiveness of these investments will be further eroded if we continue to focus on a few grand infrastructure projects.Rather than trying to achieve some dramatic and clearly non-realisable ideal, it would be much more productive to see smart cities as a process rather than a specific outcome. The UK Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, for instance, considers smart cities to be those “in which increased citizen engagement, hard infrastructure, social capital and digital technologies make cities more liveable, resilient and better able to respond to challenges”.

Once we know the direction in which we would like to encourage a city to move, we could identify the specific measures that are needed. In such an approach all investments, howsoever small, would help.

Treating Smart Cities as a process has other advantages too. Rather than trying to impose a new concept on an old city from above, this approach would require understanding the processes that are already at work in a city. The government could then use citizen engagement, social capital, physical capital, including digital technologies, to make these processes more intelligent. The impact of such a strategy on urban development should not be underestimated. When we have a preconceived notion of a high technology city it could lead to decisions that are not entirely smart.

Bengaluru chose to close down a functioning airport in order to make its new airport economically viable. It does not appear to be particularly intelligent to close down existing infrastructure in order to get over a shortage of infrastructure. It could have kept open the option of modernising its existing airport.

The difficulty in treating smartness as a process is that it is much less appealing than building a few glamorous projects. An improved road that has been modified with citizen engagement and modern technology will tend to appear a less dramatic change than a large new flyover. But flashing fancy products is not always a sign of intelligence.

The writer is a professor at the School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore