Challenges of urban informality in Indian smart cities

Introduction

Smart cities in the Global South are fast emerging as key sites for neoliberal state restructuring. As Southern cities are trying to become smarter through the application of digital technology in public services, the signature tune of neoliberal urbanism – a shift in the role of the state from a provider of urban infrastructural services to that of a facilitator for private enterprise – is becoming increasingly audible. Digital platforms operated by information and communications technology (ICT) companies are replacing traditional governmental tasks. Smart cities are equated with techno-modernity in the Global South. Their development is closely associated with worlding aspirations of the urban elite to catch up with the West through technological leapfrogging (Bobbins et al., 2023; Roy and Ong, 2011). However, it remains questionable to what extent such elite-inspired urban strategies can address the challenges of urban informality, which are ubiquitous in fast-growing cities in India and elsewhere in the Global South.

Datta (2023) theorises how state digitalisation processes are transforming urban governance practices in the Global South and refers to this set of practices as ‘digitalisation-as-urbanisation’. She argues that ‘digitalisation and urbanisation are connected processes since both unfold through the information infrastructure’ (Datta, 2023: 144). The process of digitalisation-as-urbanisation enables state entities to extend their power and control over city regions by implementing digital infrastructure in collaboration with corporate partners. The growing influence of corporate actors does not necessarily mean a shrinking of the state. Rather, it enables the state to expand its power over informational peripheries – ‘spaces of informational exclusion and fragmentation in the margins of political-informational rights to territory’ (Datta, 2023: 151). These are the sites of informal settlements, slums and squatter areas that are not captured in municipal land records and bypassed in the urban planning process. Through the application of satellite, drone and GIS technologies for measuring and mapping, the digitalising state can now extend its administrative and jurisdictional frontiers over such urban grey zones. Smart cities then generate new challenges for the urban poor and lead to new patterns of marginalisation.

Digitalisation-as-urbanisation in India and its informational peripheries

The smart cities initiative is a significant moment in India's post-liberalisation urban policy that marks a clear turn towards the corporatisation of urban governance and has come to exemplify Datta's (2023) ‘digitalisation-as-urbanisation’ thesis. Digitalisation and urbanisation have emerged as two key policy priority areas at the federal level since the 1990s. With the gradual integration of India with the global economy, the export of various IT-enabled services has become the prime growth driver of the Indian economy. The ability of Indian IT professionals to penetrate the global knowledge economy market made a strong impression among the policy elites and got entwined with an ICT-powered nation-building narrative (Chatterji, 2017). While ICT companies started to receive various policy incentives, the digitisation of public services came to be prioritised.

Following economic liberalisation, urban issues also started receiving greater policy attention. First, the constitutional reforms of 1992 sought to politically empower city governments and accord social justice by reserving seats for socially marginalised sections. Then, the national government began to roll out a series of urban infrastructure funding schemes that encouraged participating cities to apply public-private partnerships (PPP), land monetisation and various other market-friendly measures. In a federal political environment, such schemes became shorthand to push through neoliberal policy agendas to sub-national levels. Moreover, entrepreneurial urbanism began to surge with the intensification of interstate economic competition. State governments sought to turn their prime urban centres into ‘world-class’ cities by undertaking urban renewal and beautification drives. However, such ‘worlding’ initiatives, which frequently involve the removal of urban squalor – slums, squatters and street vendors – have come at the expense of the urban poor (Prasad et al., 2024; Roy and Ong, 2011).

Direct policy convergence between the ICT sector and urban development started becoming apparent in 2005 when the National e-Governance Plan was dovetailed with the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM, an urban infrastructure funding scheme in vogue between 2005 and 2014) to modernise municipal administrations. In 2015, the launch of the smart cities mission (SCM) provided another strong momentum to the ‘digitalisation-as-urbanisation’ discourse. It is not a stand-alone policy but is linked to the Digital India programme – an overarching policy agenda that aims to transform India into a knowledge society and bring convergence across government programmes and databases.

However, the political-economic importance of the SCM goes well beyond the incremental progress towards the incorporation of digital technology in public service. It has brought about a significant change in the institutional mechanisms of urban governance. Unlike other federal programmes, which at the local level are handled through the elected municipal governments, city-level implementation responsibility for smart city projects is entrusted to special purpose vehicles (SPV) headed by top bureaucrats and is bestowed with enormous power. In organisational terms, the Smart City SPVs are public sector companies and have skeletal internal staffing. Most essential tasks, including urban planning and the management of command and control centres, are outsourced to consulting firms and technology providers. While the lean organisational structure of the SPVs outwardly corresponds to the neoliberal trope of ‘less government’, in effect, engagement with corporate actors has vastly expanded the surveillance power of the state (Purandare, 2021). Although there were a few SPVs running city services before, the SCM has institutionalized their roles as key governance actors at a pan-India level. Along with the SPVs, the influence of corporate actors has also substantially expanded in the urban policy space, and ‘consultocracy’ has become a key attribute of the Indian smart city model (Purandare, 2021).

However, the interface between the smart city plans rolled out through the corporatised mode of governance and the informal economy – to which the lives of most of the urban residents are tied – has not received adequate scholarly attention. This is a particularly critical issue in the context of India's ongoing urban transformation and its underlying social fault lines. While the service-sector-driven globalised economy is triggering demand for high-skilled jobs for the educated middle-class, opportunities for unskilled migrants being pushed out by a declining rural economy are only available at the bottom tier of the informal economy. The contemporary Indian city is thus a contested terrain between middle-class lifestyle aspirations and the livelihoods of the urban poor. However, social issues hardly ever receive priority in India's land-use control-centric urban planning systems. Plans are prepared in a top-down manner, where the needs of the informal economy are seldom addressed (Idiculla, 2020).

The SCM has sought to bring about a transformative change in how Indian cities are imagined. Accordingly, a key aim of the programme was to make cities ‘inclusive’ for ‘the poor and the disadvantaged’ and much emphasis has been placed on public consultation in the planning process (Ministry of Urban Development, 2015). To overcome urban planning capacity deficiency within the state planning agencies, well-known consulting firms were shortlisted by the national government to handhold the city governments during the smart city proposal preparation process.

On the ground, however, little has changed. Prasad et al. (2024) explore the question of how informality is framed within the smart city planning process and its subsequent implementation phases by focusing on three key core domains: affordable housing, infrastructure services and citizen engagement. Based on their empirically rich case studies of three prominent smart cities, they point out that ‘there is a disregard for “informality” in smart city planning in India’ and a ‘significant feature of the Indian planning practice remains unchanged despite the continuous introduction of new policies, such as the SCM’. Although citizen engagement was a requirement for all cities, it was ‘rushed and not comprehensive. More importantly, it overlooked informality and promoted the elites’ view of a smart city’ (Prasad et al., 2024). The findings of Prasad et al. (2024) thus align with Datta's (2023) standpoint that accommodation of the informal sector is an issue of only marginal concern in the worldview of the elite bureaucrat-technocrat coalition that ideates smart city plans.

Conclusion

When foregrounded against the backdrop of changes in the institutional architecture of urban governance brought about by the SCM, the depoliticised and technocratic approach towards planning in Indian smart cities raises additional questions regarding engagement between the urban poor in the informal sector and the state in the long run. While the urban middle class in India generally access the formal institutional structures of the state through regular bureaucratic channels or civil society activism, the urban poor bypassed by the system tend to depend on political intermediaries (Chatterjee, 2008).

As I have postulated elsewhere, in India and other post-colonial societies with deep social inequities, the urban poor ‘make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations’ (Chatterjee, 2008: 57). Political actors ensure protection for the informal traders, slums and squatter settlements against eviction drives and help them access civic facilities. In exchange, communities of the poor become captive vote banks of their local protector.

Although the citizenship rights of the urban poor in the informal economy are not fully acknowledged by various organs of the state bureaucracy, the compulsions of electoral politics necessitate the political actors to court them. There is thus a clientelistic relationship between urban informality and municipal political actors that acts as a form of political mobilisation and enables the marginalised population to participate in city politics. It is necessary to recall here that the progressive reforms of 1992 sought to encourage participatory planning at the municipal level. Although the implementation of various provisions of the act varies from state to state, it nevertheless ensured regular elections and politically empowered the poor. While the middle-class in India had been rather ambivalent towards municipal elections, slum dwellers and the urban poor in general vigorously take part in the process as it provides a useful platform to negotiate their claims (Chatterji, 2013). However, the scope for such negotiations has considerably shrunk in the smart cities as planning responsibilities now lie with the bureaucrat-dominated SPVs. After all, smart cities are planned for ‘smart citizens’ (Vanolo, 2014). There is hardly any space for the urban poor or the informal sector in this ‘smart’ governance process.