Building a hundred smart cities is one thing. Knowing whether they actually work is another. When the Government of India launched the Smart Cities Mission in 2015, it committed thousands of crores of public money to retrofitting, redeveloping, and digitising urban areas across the country. To make sure that money translated into real outcomes, the Mission built a layered monitoring and evaluation system that operates at three levels: national, state, and city. Each tier has clearly defined responsibilities, and together they form a chain of accountability that runs from the Secretary of the Union Ministry all the way down to a Resident Welfare Association in a neighbourhood. Understanding how this three-tier structure functions is essential to understanding how a programme this large is supposed to stay on track.
Table of Contents
- Why monitoring matters in a mission this size
- National-level monitoring: the Apex Committee
- The power to recommend mid-course corrections
- State-level monitoring: the High-Powered Steering Committee
- Reviewing Smart City Plans and running the state competition
- City-level monitoring: the Smart City Advisory Forum
- Who sits on the forum
- Where the city-level tier has struggled
- How evaluation works in practice
- What a decade of data shows
- The logic of the three-tier design
Why monitoring matters in a mission this size
The Smart Cities Mission is a centrally sponsored scheme covering 100 cities. The funding model is straightforward but demanding: the central government contributes around Rs 500 crore per city over five years, and the state government and Urban Local Body (ULB) are expected to match that amount. With matching contributions, multiple agencies, and dozens of projects per city, the potential for delays, cost overruns, and misalignment is enormous.
This is exactly why monitoring is provided at three levels – national, state, and city – as laid out in the smart city guidelines. Each level answers a different question. The national level asks whether the Mission as a whole is meeting its goals and whether funds are being released appropriately. The state level asks whether cities within a state are competing fairly and implementing their plans correctly. The city level asks whether projects on the ground reflect the needs of the people who actually live there. Without all three working together, accountability breaks down.
National-level monitoring: the Apex Committee
At the top of the structure sits the Apex Committee (AC). It is headed by the Secretary of the Ministry of Urban Development (now the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs) and includes representatives from related ministries and organisations. Its mandate has three core functions: approve proposals for the Smart Cities Mission, monitor their progress, and release funds.
This means the Apex Committee is the gatekeeper for the entire programme. A city’s Smart City Proposal does not become a funded project until the AC approves it. Once approved, the Committee continues to track how each city is performing and decides when to release the next tranche of central funds. The Apex Committee also monitored project activities and recommended mid-course corrections, releasing public funds to the Special Purpose Vehicles under the direction of a national mission director.
The power to recommend mid-course corrections
The ability to recommend mid-course corrections is one of the most important features of national-level monitoring. Large infrastructure programmes rarely go exactly as planned. Land disputes, litigation, and changing local priorities can all force a city to rethink its approach. Rather than letting a project drift, the Apex Committee can step in and recommend changes while work is still underway. This keeps the Mission responsive instead of locking cities into plans that no longer make sense.
The Committee meets periodically, as considered necessary, rather than on a rigid calendar. This flexibility allows it to respond to issues as they arise. Supporting the AC is the National Mission Directorate, which handles day-to-day coordination across the Centre, states, ULBs, and external agencies, and develops the detailed implementation roadmap for the Mission.
State-level monitoring: the High-Powered Steering Committee
The middle tier is the State-level High-Powered Steering Committee (HPSC), chaired by the Chief Secretary of the state. The HPSC steers the Mission programme in its entirety within the state. It includes representatives of state government departments, and the Mayor and Municipal Commissioner of the ULB relating to the Smart City are also represented on it. A State Mission Director – an officer not below the rank of Secretary to the State Government – functions as the Member-Secretary of the committee.
The HPSC sits between national policy and city-level execution. It translates the broad direction set by the Apex Committee into something workable for cities within its jurisdiction, while also feeding ground realities back upward. This makes it a crucial link in the accountability chain.
Reviewing Smart City Plans and running the state competition
One of the HPSC’s defining roles is its involvement in the City Challenge, the competitive process through which cities were selected. The selection happened in stages. The first stage was an intra-state competition, in which cities within a state competed against one another on a set of conditions precedent and scoring criteria. The highest-scoring cities were shortlisted to advance to the national stage of the Challenge.
The HPSC oversees this state-level competition. The information submitted by ULBs is first evaluated by the State Mission Director, and that evaluation is then placed before the HPSC for approval. The committee reviews the Smart City Plans (SCPs) and sends the shortlisted proposals to the Ministry for participation in the national Challenge. In short, no city’s plan reaches the national stage without clearing the state committee first. This two-stage filter – state then national – is what the Mission calls cooperative and competitive federalism in action.
City-level monitoring: the Smart City Advisory Forum
The third tier is where the Mission meets the citizen. At the city level, every Smart City is required to form a Smart City Advisory Forum (SCAF) to enable local collaboration and citizen participation. The actual implementation of projects is carried out by a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), a company set up specifically to plan, appraise, approve, release funds, implement, manage, operate, monitor, and evaluate Smart City development projects. The SCAF is the body that brings stakeholders around the table to advise and guide that SPV.
Who sits on the forum
The SCAF is deliberately broad in its membership so that no single group dominates decision-making. According to the guidelines, the forum brings together the District Collector, Members of Parliament, Members of the Legislative Assembly, the Mayor, the CEO of the SPV, local youth, and technical experts. It also includes representatives from the area’s Resident Welfare Association, and bodies such as NGOs, Chambers of Commerce, and women’s groups (Mahila Mandals).
The CEO of the SPV serves as the convener of the Smart City Advisory Forum. This is a significant design choice. The same person responsible for executing projects is also responsible for convening the forum that scrutinises them, which keeps implementation and consultation tightly linked. The forum is meant to empower citizens to participate in the democratic selection of projects, and it can demand the publishing of Detailed Project Reports (DPRs) and seek public suggestions and objections on them.
Where the city-level tier has struggled
The SCAF is the tier where the gap between design and reality has been widest. A parliamentary review found that while the guidelines provide for consultation through the SCAF, forum meetings were irregular in many cities, with some cities not holding any at all. In Pune, citizen groups complained that the SCAF had not been formed even sixteen months after the SPV was set up. In Tamil Nadu, activists pointed to non-existent forums and unfilled CEO posts as recurring problems.
These gaps matter because the SCAF is the mechanism through which ordinary residents are supposed to shape projects. When it does not meet, the link between the Mission and the people it serves weakens. The same parliamentary committee recommended that Members of Parliament be included in both city-level and state-level advisory bodies to strengthen grassroots connections, and that SPV CEOs be given fixed tenures, since their frequent transfers proved disruptive to project continuity.
How evaluation works in practice
Monitoring is not only about committees and meetings. A large part of evaluation now happens through technology. Every Smart City has set up an Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC), which acts as the operational nerve centre for the city. These centres pull in real-time data from sensors and applications across sectors such as traffic, water supply, waste management, energy, and public safety, and turn that data into insights for administrators.
The ICCC effectively gives the monitoring tiers something concrete to measure. Instead of relying only on periodic reports, officials can track urban services as they happen. All 100 Smart Cities now have operational ICCCs, and these centres notably served as COVID-19 war rooms during the pandemic, coordinating health monitoring and emergency response in cities such as Ahmedabad, Pune, Bhopal, and Varanasi.
The Ministry has also moved towards outcome-based evaluation. In 2024, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs commissioned an audit and assessment organisation to study a maturity index of the Smart Cities through measurable outcomes of their use cases. This signals a shift from simply tracking spending to assessing whether projects actually improved urban life – the harder and more meaningful question.
What a decade of data shows
The evaluation framework has produced a mixed but honest picture. An analysis of 60 cities by the Centre for Policy Research found that the Mission tended to prioritise projects tied to economic growth and technology, with comparatively less investment in social infrastructure. On the spending side, ICCC projects had used 98.3% of their available funds by February 2025, the highest utilisation across all Mission sectors. These findings are only possible because the three-tier system, combined with data platforms, generates the information needed to assess performance. A monitoring framework that surfaces uncomfortable truths is doing its job.
The logic of the three-tier design
Seen as a whole, the structure follows a clear logic. The Apex Committee holds the purse strings and the power to approve and correct, giving it leverage over the entire Mission. The HPSC manages competition and plan review within each state, ensuring fairness and alignment with state priorities. The SCAF anchors the whole system in local reality, bringing elected representatives, experts, and citizens into the conversation. Funding accountability flows downward from the Centre, while feedback on ground conditions flows upward from the city.
The design is sound on paper. Its weaknesses, as the parliamentary reviews show, appear when one tier does not function as intended – most often the city-level forum. The lesson from a decade of implementation is that a monitoring framework is only as strong as its weakest link, and the link closest to citizens has often been the most neglected.
What do you think? If the city-level Advisory Forum is the tier most directly connected to citizens yet the one most often left dormant, what reforms would actually compel cities to convene it regularly? And as evaluation shifts from tracking spending to measuring outcomes, what outcomes should matter most when we judge whether a city has truly become “smart”?
References
- https://www.competitiveness.in/envisioning-a-truly-smart-city/
- https://www.ibef.org/government-schemes/smart-cities-mission
- https://csd.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/docs/ICT%20India/Papers/ICT_India_Working_Paper_62.pdf
- https://smartcities.gov.in/implementation
- https://policy.asiapacificenergy.org/node/2665
- https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/city-and-architecture/a7126-an-overview-of-smart-cities-mission-india/
- https://www.deccanherald.com/india/state-level-panels-city-forums-2138236
- https://thesecretariat.in/article/without-conceptual-and-structural-clarity-smart-cities-will-remain-a-dull-plan
- https://compass.rauias.com/current-affairs/launch-next-phase-smart-cities-mission-panel/
- https://www.securitylinkindia.com/feature/29/smart-cities-mission-in-india-genesis-implementation-impact-study/
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d44151-025-00229-5
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