By: Nimmi Verma and Titiksha Raushan
A newly laid road near my neighbourhood in Ayodhya was satisfying to look at. Days later, workers ripped it open again to lay a water pipeline, because no one had thought to loop in the water department before the tar went down. Bilaspur tells the same story with a different face. A stretch of road there carries brand-new smart traffic signals and CCTV cameras, standing a few feet from a drain that has overflowed, ignored, for months.
We are residents of Bilaspur and Ayodhya, and this piece began as a casual conversation between us about our own cities. What started as small talk turned into a pattern neither of us could shake. Freshly lit roads get dug up within weeks. Cameras watch over drains that nobody drains. Both cities sit under the same Smart Cities Mission, the same funding formula, the same guidelines, yet a handful of other SCM cities show none of this neglect. That gap is the puzzle driving this piece: why does one policy produce such different outcomes on the ground?
The Smart Cities Mission was launched in 2015 with an ambitious promise: to transform Indian cities through institutional, physical, social and economic infrastructure, complemented by digital technologies and data-driven governance (MoHUA, 2015). A decade later, judging its success is far from straightforward. Some cities have woven technology into everyday service delivery. Others continue to struggle with basic urban services despite visible investment in smart infrastructure. The policy is the same everywhere. The experience of living with it is not.
State capacity: The missing piece
As residents of Bilaspur and Ayodhya, we experience the SCM not through policy documents but through everyday life. A smart traffic signal, a command centre, a newly laid road, and a CCTV system are all visible. The institutional systems that make them work are not.
Urban transformation does not happen through infrastructure alone. It depends on the less visible capabilities of the institutions responsible for planning, financing, implementing, monitoring and maintaining that infrastructure over time. Pritchett, Andrews and Woolcock call this gap isomorphic mimicry: governments sustain legitimacy by copying the outward form of functional, “modern” institutions without building the functional capability that would make those forms actually work. In Bilaspur and Ayodhya, that mimicry looks like beautification drives and digital infrastructure standing in for the administrative capacity needed to run urban systems well. Reforms fail here not because local governments resist reform, but because the policy elites who design them import “best practice” models shaped by their own experience rather than the realities of the cities meant to adopt them.
Over time, that gap between form and function produces what Pritchett, Andrews and Woolcock call a capability trap: governments keep adopting new reforms and institutional structures without building the capacity to make any of them work. Coordination between departments cannot fix this. Before departments can coordinate with each other, each one needs the capacity to do its own job.
Overlooked basics
This kind of capability is exactly what a Smart City proposal fails to reward. Beautifying existing infrastructure and installing “SMART” systems is comparatively easy, and both are visible and marketable. The harder work happens behind the scenes, and none of it makes for a ribbon-cutting.
Under the SCM, a Special Purpose Vehicle handles implementation, while water, electricity, roads, telecom, sewerage and transport often remain under separate departments. Policy guidelines and CAG audits have both identified this coordination gap (CAG, 2025), yet it persists, at least in Ayodhya and Bilaspur.
A structural flaw runs through the policy: SCM projects are layered onto weak foundations in water supply, sanitation, waste management, electricity, and mobility, rather than fixing those foundations first. Tier 3 urban local bodies like Bilaspur and Ayodhya compound the problem. Their technical teams are small, their monitoring mechanisms limited, and their reliance on external consultants high. Departments need the capacity to do their own jobs before they can meaningfully coordinate with each other. Yet, the policy treats coordination as achievable independent of the capacity gaps that undermine it.
That gap between promise and practice raises a simple question: what actually constitutes a “smart” city? When technological interventions coexist with unreliable basic services and growing procedural burdens, the promise of “smart” risks becoming a performance rather than a lived urban reality.
A City that did differently
Visiting both large and small cities across India as residents of Tier 3 cities ourselves, we came to a simple conclusion: technology and infrastructure alone cannot build a genuinely “smart” city. Efficient delivery depends on the invisible infrastructure beneath it, the administration that makes it run. To test that claim, we turned to Udaipur as a contrast. Like Bilaspur, it is the headquarters of an administrative division. Like Ayodhya, it is a major cultural tourism destination.
What sets Udaipur apart is the distinction it draws between infrastructure and institutional capability. Municipal audits in Bilaspur and Ayodhya reveal deficiencies in financial management, project monitoring, contractor oversight and administrative capacity. Udaipur’s implementation record tells a different story, one that consistently foregrounds the less visible work of project delivery (USCL, 2023). Its Smart City documentation repeatedly treats coordination among the municipal corporation, district administration, engineers, planners, financial officers and project consultants as integral to implementation, not as an afterthought. Set against Bilaspur and Ayodhya, Udaipur shows that smart technologies cannot substitute for weak institutional systems. They depend on those systems to function at all.
Udaipur has not cracked the code. Independent audits of the city reveal persistent weaknesses in the municipal systems meant to sustain urban transformation. Mandatory five-year execution plans and annual municipal plans went unprepared. Annual accounts were delayed for years. Asset registers remained incomplete. Monitoring mechanisms for public infrastructure, public toilets among them, proved ineffective, leaving poor maintenance in place despite contractual provisions for inspection and penalties.
Even so, Udaipur’s emphasis on administrative coordination, multidisciplinary implementation teams and sustained stakeholder engagement supports the same proposition this piece has been building towards: urban transformation depends on organisational capability as much as on technological investment. The contrast with Bilaspur, then, is not simply about the quality of finished infrastructure. It lies in how central institutional coordination is to planning, sustaining and delivering that infrastructure over time.
Looking beyond
Taken together, these cities unfold the nuanced story of SCM that operates across municipalities with differing levels of administrative capability, but the real divide is not between “successful” and “unsuccessful” cities but between different degrees of administrative readiness. Technology and infrastructure may be visible symbols of progress, but institutional capacity is what ultimately defines the value of delivery years after a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Every city under SCM got the same blueprint, but not every city possessed the common starting point to implement the vision. This argument doesn’t make the Smart City Mission a failure; rather, it shifts attention from policy work to analysing what truly makes a city “smart”.
The next time you walk through your neighbourhood, look beyond brand-new Smart Traffic signals and freshly laid roads and ask yourself: What story do my city’s institutions tell?
About the Authors:
Nimmi Verma is a Master’s student in Public Administration with an interest in public policy, particularly education and gender. She previously worked as a Team Co-Lead, Policy and Advocacy Intern at an education-focused think tank, contributing to policy research and advocacy initiatives.
Titiksha Raushan is a Master’s student in Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. Her interests include public policy, governance, inequality, and gender. She has research experience in areas such as vaccine hesitancy, menstrual health, education policy, and qualitative fieldwork.
India’s Smart Cities initiative shows how technology can improve urban services, but the real measure of a “smart” city is whether it makes everyday life safer, cleaner, faster, and more accessible for citizens.