Smart Cities Mission

Imagine renovating a hundred different houses at once, each with a different starting layout, budget and set of priorities, but all judged against the same broad idea of what a modern home should look like. That was, in essence, the challenge behind India's Smart Cities Mission, launched in 2015 to retrofit and redevelop 100 selected cities using technology, better infrastructure and improved governance.

Rather than a single template, each selected city designed its own area-based development plan and pan-city smart solutions, typically anchored around an Integrated Command and Control Centre, or ICCC, a technology hub that monitors traffic, utilities, safety and municipal services from one place. The scale of investment was substantial, with total approved spending across all 100 cities reaching roughly Rs 1,64,811 crore.

By September 2025, according to a NITI Aayog evaluation, the mission had reached roughly 93% project completion across over 8,000 projects, with all planned ICCCs fully operational. The mission's dedicated financial phase officially closed on 31 March 2025, with a small number of remaining projects, worth roughly Rs 9,425 crore, continuing to completion outside fresh central funding.

The mission's real legacy is arguably less about any single flagship project and more about building municipal capacity, many cities that had never systematically used data for urban management now run functioning command centres, and gained genuine project execution experience working with private contractors under PPP-style structures.

Whenever a city government is described as unusually data-driven or technologically capable for municipal governance in India, there is a reasonable chance that capability was seeded, at least in part, by the Smart Cities Mission's decade-long push.