Buildings under construction in the new town of Greater Noida, supposed to relieve congestion in New Delhi and its 17 million inhabitants, in 25 kilometers from there. | CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP

Dreams have never been so far from reality. India wishes to build or to redesign 109 ‘smart cities’ in a huge country where urbanization is rapid and nightmarish. Half of the most polluted cities in the world are Indian and a third of the urban population does not have access to tap water. In Delhi, only 17% of households are connected to the sanitation system.

In other words, the ‘smart cities’ initiative launched by the Indian government in 2015 is extremely ambitious. The aim: ‘To promote cities equipped with basic infrastructures providing all citizens with a decent quality of life, a clean environment and a use of smart solutions’. The government is committed to contributing a total of 6.9 billion Euros to the projects selected but has been careful not to give a precise definition of ‘smart solutions’. The municipal authorities are better placed to decide in function of their economic fabric, their specificity and their geographical situation. As we can read in the document setting out the main orientations of the project, each town ‘must set out its own project, its own vision and its proposal for a smart city, in keeping with the local context, its resources and its ambitions’.

For example, the city of Agra, which is home to the Taj Mahal, wishes to construct a museum devoted to Moghul history to provide support for its tourism industry. Jalandhar, where many Indian athletes come from, wishes to build a city of sport. In Jaipur, located on the edge of the desert, the town-planning scheme focuses on the construction of green buildings, which save energy and harvest rainwater, while in Surat, a coastal town, the priority is on the campaign to reduce the risk of flooding. In India, there is no standard model of smart city. The projects are selected in the context of a nation-wide competition based on the ‘cooperative and competitive federalism’ model dear to the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Numerous criteria have been chosen for the selection of the urban projects, including the share of production of solar energy, a minimum of 10%, the attention given to social diversity, the viability of the financial plan or again the level of participation of local residents. Each municipality must present a project for the renovation, reconstruction or creation of a district, while at the same time proposing the setting up of at least one ‘smart’ solution for the town as a whole, for example a traffic management system or the recycling of waste water.

Sixty of the 109 towns supported by the projected have already been chosen. In March, only 10% of the 731 projects which had received the definitive go-ahead from the central government had started or were finished. These urban projects constitute a huge market. A memo from the Ministry of Finance, published in June 2015, evaluated the Indian requirements in urban investment and infrastructure over the next twenty years at 680 billion Euros. All the sectors are concerned: from urban mobility to the construction of proper sanitation networks, through to public lighting or the processing of waste. Something to whet the appetites of firms …. as long as they invest. The government wishes to promote public/private partnerships (PPP), a solution which enables public money to be saved and to entrust the project management to a special purpose vehicle (SPV), an agency composed of representatives of the municipality and the investors, shielded from the slow pace and the twists and turns of Indian administration.

Anil Menon, responsible for smart and connected communities at Cisco, the American giant of telecommunications stated in the daily newspaper The Times of India, “Indian cities lack specific objectives. The initiative of a Delhi-Mumbai (Bombay) corridor where the government wishes to develop seven smart cities in six States is progressing because it operates like a private firm where the projects are supervised by a managing director”.

Huge centres of economic production

Neighbourhoods run like firms by managers? The idea has caught on amongst urban planners. Anil Kumar Vaddiraju, a researcher at the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, states “The projects have developed at the expense of exclusion. Poor migrants from rural areas are unwelcome. The towns are dominated by a local elite and urban development is concentrated in the giant urban conurbations. Entrusting the management of urban projects to public-private partnerships could accelerate the process of discrimination towards the poorest by transforming the town into huge centres of economic production. In several towns like Indore or Bhubaneswar, some of the shanty towns have been bulldozed and not all the families have been re-housed.

Even if the 109 new cities have to include in their projects the rehabilitation of shanty towns or the inclusion of poor families, the budgets allocated for this purpose are often minimal. In the words of Bhanu Joshi, a researcher at Center for Policy Research in Delhi, the project of creating new towns “does not take into account all those who make up an urban space. Making land profitable by building smart districts is not enough to make a city inclusive, viable or intelligent”.

Exhaustion of the water tables

In matters of urban planning in India, being ‘smart’ means designing cities which consume a minimum of environmental resources. The number of city dwellers could increase by 500 million between now and 2050, which means that India will have to build the equivalent of two Singapores each year. Now several mega-cities like Bangalore or Chennai (Madras) are already threatened by the exhaustion of their water tables. Many of their inhabitants are supplied by cistern-trucks which take water from neighbouring rural areas. Technological firms jostle for position on this market in the hope of selling an « intelligence » of the data which would enable optimal usage of these resources. For example, sensors could alert the authorities to leaking water pipes, or switch on public lighting only when a pedestrian or a vehicle is passing.

In contrast to the model of the energy-consuming mega-cities, what if the smart 21^st century city was ‘natural’? The well-known Indian architect and city planner, Romi Khosla, has made a plea for the creation of thousands of autonomous “natural cities, home to a multiplicity of local cultures, each with its own identity and unique way of functioning which would protect them from the homogenisation of globalisation and climate change”. These numerous towns, small in size, would be an alternative to mega-cities, in response to the challenges of urbanisation. This is an ideal which is not so distant from that of Gandhi, who stated that India “exists in its villages”.

Whatever the path taken, India will not escape the imperative of planning. Roads are often planned and constructed after the foundations of the buildings have been laid. City planners often come after the real estate developers. Optimists predict that planning will one day replace anarchic development.