Driving Urban Digitalisation through a National Mission– a multilevel governance perspective of India’s data smart cities strategy

This article analyses the Data Smart Cities Strategy, a key policy component under India’s ambitious 100 Smart Cities Mission, to understand how a national government-driven urban digitalisation agenda is being implemented in a federal political system where urban development responsibilities are shared between different tiers. A review of the implementation progress shows wide city-to-city variation in digitalisation and data readiness. Using the lens of multilevel governance as the analytical framework, our study highlights the importance of state-level factors in shaping city-level outcomes. Governance capacities and administrative attention towards urban issues vary significantly from state to state. This, in turn, impacts city performances as the institutional architecture of smart cities is dominated by state-level actors. We flag concerns that the top-down digitalisation agenda may widen the regional divide. While seed capital provided under the central scheme helped cities in poorer states to build expensive digital infrastructure, there are uncertainties regarding how these will be managed once the scheme ends.