Smart Cities, Dumb Accountability
What Are “Smart Cities” and What Are They Expected to Do?
The concept of a “smart city” is not, at least in terms of law or policy, limited to technology. Smart cities aim to enhance the delivery of basic urban services by leveraging data, digital systems, and coordinated planning. The expectation is not that cities become futuristic, but that they become more efficient, responsive, and manageable.
In India, smart city projects typically focus on areas such as traffic management, waste collection, water supply, disaster response, and urban infrastructure. Sensors, control rooms, dashboards, and digital platforms are introduced with the stated objective of enabling quicker decision-making and better monitoring. In theory, this should reduce delays, prevent recurring failures, and allow municipal authorities to respond before problems escalate.
From a governance perspective, smart cities are therefore expected to perform a fairly basic function: to make existing municipal responsibilities work better. They are not meant to replace municipal law or urban governance, but to support it. The promise is improvement in outcomes, not a change in the nature of public power itself.
However, the implementation of smart city initiatives often introduces new institutional structures alongside existing municipal ones. In many cases, smart city functions are carried out through special-purpose vehicles (SPVs) or project-specific authorities. These bodies operate with a degree of autonomy, manage significant funds, and make operational decisions related to urban services. While this model is designed to improve efficiency, it also creates a separation between service delivery and traditional municipal accountability mechanisms.
Accountability in Municipal Law: The Basic Framework
Municipal law is built around the idea that local bodies are responsible for everyday governance affecting citizens most directly. Roads, drainage, sanitation, licensing, and local infrastructure fall within their domain. Accountability in this context is traditionally linked to proximity: the closer the authority is to the people, the easier it should be to identify responsibility and demand explanations.
In practical terms, accountability in municipal governance rests on three basic elements. First, there must be answerability. When a service fails, it should be possible to identify which authority or office is responsible. Second, there must be consequences. Failure should attract some form of institutional response, whether corrective, disciplinary, or political. Third, there must be transparency, allowing citizens to understand decisions, question them, and seek remedies.
These elements do not require sophisticated legal standards. They are embedded in the everyday functioning of local government. Municipal law assumes that because local authorities deal with routine civic issues, their actions should be visible, traceable, and subject to public scrutiny. Even though newer technology is deployed to enhance distribution, these elements are still the same. Smart cities transform the way cities operate, but not how they are governed.
Dumb Accountability
Newer technology doesn’t necessarily mean better accountability. Smart city projects often overlook accountability. In fact, they hamper all three elements of accountability: answerability, consequence, and transparency. This project introduced SPVs. Citizens were already confused about where to go for answers. This policy further confuses people by adding vagueness about whether the municipality or the SPVs are responsible.
SPVs and municipalities now play blame games before the court when it’s time to face the music. This, in turn, just delays the court’s decision. Both the responsible authorities exploit this play to escape consequences. In a country with an already slow justice system, smart cities create another delay.
A lack of education or a reluctance to review the accounts of municipalities has been a persistent issue for a long time. Smart cites does nothing to make this, or any other, data more accessible to people. SPVs with a separate fund allotment only add to the hindrance of transparency. Questionable accountability is there even when we don’t assume corruption, which is rampant in India.
Admittedly, the digitalisation of records makes it easy to trace any information. However, this is just a drop in the bucket in terms of accountability, as the data is not easily accessible to the general public. By the time the court orders the data, it’s already too late, and the delay has already defeated accountability.
Conclusion
Municipal governance depends on local authorities being closest and most accountable to citizens. Weak accountability hinders daily governance, rendering predictable problems as isolated incidents rather than systemic issues. Smart city projects, emphasising technology, may overlook this structural flaw. Better monitoring alone doesn’t ensure responsibility; data shows failures but doesn’t assign blame or enforce consequences. As a result, urban governance seems advanced but stays institutionally fragile.
The Smart Cities project, raising more questions around accountability from all fronts, only adds to the already burdened system. The policy overlooks the fundamentals of governance and only provides ornamental value through technological reforms, while complexly ignoring the core of municipal governance, which is accountability.
