Tikender Singh Panwar
Smart cities created enclaves of digital governance while leaving the rest of the city untouched. The result: a centralised, corporatised, and exclusionary model of digitisation.
It is the season of digital spectacle. From Smart Cities to the National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM), the Union government never misses an opportunity to announce a grand plan for “transforming urban India.” Glossy dashboards, artificial intelligence claims, and billion-dollar contracts are flaunted as if technology alone can rescue India’s cities.
Yet step into the lanes of Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, or Bareilly and ask a councillor for hyper-local data on water pipelines or storm drains, and the answer is silence. Beneath the slogans lies a stark truth: India does not have a coherent digital planning architecture. It has platforms in search of problems, contractors in search of profits, and cities left without power over their own digital futures.
The smart cities legacy: Hype without substance
We have been here before. The Smart Cities Mission was sold as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernise urban India. Instead, it delivered fragmented projects – command centres that looked impressive on inauguration day but rarely helped citizens during floods or fires.
The problem was never just poor execution. It was design. Smart Cities bypassed municipal governments and handed contracts to private vendors. They created enclaves of digital governance while leaving the rest of the city untouched. The result: a centralised, corporatised, and exclusionary model of digitisation.
The NUDM threatens to repeat the same mistake – only this time, at national scale.
The NUDM mirage
Launched in 2021 with fanfare, the NUDM claims it will create a “shared digital infrastructure” for all cities, standardising data models, APIs, and registries. On paper, it promises efficiency and interoperability. In practice, it is a blueprint for centralised control.
The mission dictates platforms from Delhi, reducing municipalities to passive users rather than co-creators of their own digital systems. This is fatal for a country as diverse as India. Can the same framework work for a hill town in Himachal and a sprawling metro like Mumbai? The answer is obvious.
Worse still, NUDM consolidates data in central repositories. This is not just a technical flaw – it is a democratic one. It risks creating data monopolies vulnerable to corporate capture and political misuse. If digital governance is to shape the next 25 years of our urban life, leaving it in the hands of a few distant technocrats is a recipe for exclusion and abuse.
NUDM could have been a federated system – city-first, locally owned, with the option to plug into national networks when useful. Instead, it is becoming a bureaucratic mirage, designed to look sleek while hollowing out local autonomy.
When technology erases the citizen
Digitisation, when imposed from above, often misrepresents or erases the very people it claims to serve. Consider property tax reforms driven by GIS mapping. In many cities, entire informal settlements vanish from digital records, while long-regularised homes are misclassified and overtaxed. The digital map becomes the “truth,” and lived reality becomes irrelevant.
Or take the story from a so-called Smart City review meeting. A woman from a poor settlement stood up and said: “There is no drain outside my house. The engineer says it’s not on the map. But I am here – I am not a ghost!” Her words capture the tragedy of technocratic planning: when maps override the human voice, citizens themselves disappear.
Digitisation creates value – through efficiency gains, predictive insights, and new services. But who captures this value? In India, the answer is clear: not the cities, not the citizens. Outsourced platforms and private contractors extract data, monetise it, and return little.
Digital surplus is being privatised, while the costs – financial, social, and political – are borne by the public. This is not innovation; it is digital feudalism.
What alternatives look like
The good news is that alternatives exist.
Barcelona shows a solution. Under Mayor Ada Colau, the city refused to hand over user data to tech monopolies, built its own open-source platforms, and created Decidim – a participatory tool that allows residents to co-design budgets and policies. By keeping data sovereign and fostering local civic-tech start-ups, Barcelona turned digitisation into democratic innovation.
In Shimla, the fight for digital sovereignty was smaller but no less significant. When a telecom operator wanted to dig up public roads for fibre ducts, we approved only on the condition that it lay two additional ducts free for the city. Those ducts today power CCTV, public Wi-Fi, and municipal services without burdening the budget. It was a simple principle: if private companies use public infrastructure, the public must benefit in return.
Kerala, too, offers lessons. Its state-wide digital task force envisions district spatial data centres, public digital infrastructure for sectors like health and education, and systematic training for local officials. Unlike Delhi’s centralised approach, Kerala puts capacity-building and decentralisation at its core, ensuring data remains a public resource rather than a private commodity.
The illusion of neutral tech
Whether it is blockchain for land records or AI dashboards for policing, we are repeatedly told that technology itself will solve governance. This is a dangerous illusion. Who owns the blockchain ledger? Who writes the AI algorithm? Who validates the “truth” embedded in code? Unless publicly controlled and locally accountable, these tools simply reproduce old hierarchies in digital form.
The shift towards democratic digitisation
If India truly wants liveable cities, it must abandon its obsession with centralised dashboards and contractor-driven platforms. Instead, it must:
- Build open, interoperable, city-owned platforms.
- Create urban digital cadres inside municipalities – trained staff who can handle data with competence and accountability.
- Pass legal data charters that enshrine citizen ownership and mandate public audits.
- Launch participatory – “Digital Townhall”, platforms that let residents map, plan, and co-design their neighbourhoods.
- Invest in digital literacy for women, informal workers, and the elderly so digitisation does not deepen exclusion.
These are not utopian ideas – they are practical steps that cities across the world are already taking.
From digital to democratic
The Union government continues to peddle top-down digital fantasies. But cities are not apps to be managed from a control room. They are spaces of citizenship, conflict, and cooperation.
Digitisation must therefore be distributed, deliberative, and decentralised. It must treat citizens not as data points but as co-creators. Above all, it must be accountable to the people, not to contracts or central dashboards.
India’s urban future will be digital – that much is inevitable. The real question is whether it will be democratic. Unless we move from digital control to digital commons, our cities will remain trapped in empty promises: “smart” for a few, unliveable for the many.
Tikender Singh Panwar is an author of three books on urbanisation — The Cities in Transition, The Radical City, Challenges of Urban Governance; He is a former Deputy Mayor of Shimla and currently a member of the Kerala Urban Commission
The article was first published in The Wire as ‘Digital Cities’ Built on Empty Promises on 27 Aug 2025.
Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.
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Acknowledgment: This article was posted by Srishti, a Research Intern at IMPRI.
