Indian Smart Cities and Their Financing: A First Look

Abstract

The extant international literature on smart cities, which are conceptualized and designed to enhance the quality of well-being, fails to provide a homogeneously unifying definition of smart city. This lack of comprehensive knowledge manifests into a critical policy challenge to policy managers responsible for creating and managing complex contours of evolution of smart cities. Smart cities, however, are increasingly becoming a subject to public debate worldwide, which appears to be a strong value-enhancing approach to managing future cities. This paper critically reviews the existing definitional conceptualization of smart cities and their changing frames in global setting across a range of criteria borrowed from literature. Further, the research maps a potential Indian smart city (case of GIFT City) on comparable framework of global smart cities with an objective of developing insights into planned efficiency of smart cities in India. The study also examines different strategies of smart city development with a spatial approach and understanding the way in which these strategies can fit into India’s urban scenario. The second part of the paper delves into financing of smart cities in India. Having taken into account India’s budgetary plans to develop 100 smart cities, we assess the scale and effectiveness of the plans. Given the potential economic profiles of such cities and associated financial outlays, we also explore likely sources of financing for smart cities with a strong focus on risk-return trade-offs.