Exploring sustainability of smart development initiatives in India

Urban cities of developing countries are witnessing rapid urbanization that has elevated issues in the field of urban planning like a gap in demand and supply of infrastructure services and utilities, traffic congestions, pollution, reduction in natural green cover, peri-urban settlement typology etc, thus affecting the natural and built environment adversely. These prevailing issues will worsen over the coming decades as the urban population is increasing at a phenomenal rate, thus highlighting the urgency to take appropriate actions.

Smart development has been identified as a sustainable world-wide solution to the existing urban planning issues, whose principles aims at providing a better quality of life and advertises livable communities; though the concept is vague to define, as no universal definition exists. The soul reason for the concept to be vague is the number of dimensions in which it is represented and therefore, the concept needs to be standardized in order to scale development worldwide.

India has undergone rapid urbanization over the last few decades and the witnessing cities are mostly of Class-I & II tiers. To cater the issues developed by this phenomenon, the governing authorities have taken up initiatives over the years, in the form of programmes that have mainly focused on providing basic infrastructure services and utilities to the cities and have not paid much attention in achieving sustainability in the approach. Recently, India has introduced the smart city mission, which is somewhat on the similar lines of smart development. Since the development is been interpreted differently among the nations due to no standardization of the concept, it’s important to understand how the concept has been represented in the Indian context.

The paper intended to analyse the concept of smart development and explore the sustainability quotient in the smart city mission introduced by the Government of India. And, concluding that whether the initiative taken up, achieves sustainability in the field of urban planning. To achieve the above-mentioned goals, an in-depth analysis was conducted of the various concepts associated with smart development.