Smart Cities & Urban Renewal

With a third of Indians now urban, the Smart Cities Mission (2015) chose 100 cities to pilot modern living — integrated command centres, smart utilities, better public spaces and e-governance — alongside AMRUT's water and sewerage upgrades.

Together the missions drove roughly 8,000 projects worth ~₹1.6 lakh crore — smart roads, integrated control rooms, riverfronts, and digital services — most now complete, alongside new metros and cleaner cities.

The Smart Cities Mission picked 100 cities to modernise through locally-chosen projects, run by dedicated Special Purpose Vehicles (companies) rather than regular municipal departments, to speed delivery. The signature idea is the Integrated Command and Control Centre — a city's digital 'brain' pulling together traffic, CCTV, water, waste and emergency data on one screen — alongside area-based upgrades to roads, transport and public spaces.

Across the 100 cities, most of the roughly 8,000 projects (about ₹1.6 lakh crore) are complete, and the command centres proved their worth during the pandemic. The next step is scaling from pilot pockets to whole cities — most projects transformed a small 'area-based' zone, so the challenge is spreading those gains city-wide, sustaining the tech, and financing the next wave of urban renewal as India rapidly urbanises.

The next step is scaling from pilot pockets to whole cities — strengthening municipal finances and staffing so the 'smart' gains reach beyond select zones. (Project counts here are indicative.)

100 cities; ~8,000 projects, ~₹1.6 lakh crore (indicative); Smart Cities Mission (2015) + AMRUT. Source: MoHUA.