India’s mission to sustainably develop 100 cities

Key takeaways

• Methods and approaches for policy design and delivery have to be rooted in the context they are being applied
• Challenges with powers, people and funding creates a context of adversity for policymakers in many emerging cities
• Focusing on outcomes, building capabilities and strengthening markets is an overarching policy approach to address these challenges

And some stats

• 4,000: the number of cities in India
• $6bn: initial funding for the Smart Cities Mission
• $500 billion - India’s infrastructure investment requirement this decade

Cities are responsible for around 70% of global CO2 emissions.

How urban policymakers address the challenges of policy design and delivery for climate action is an important subplot in the multifaceted net zero story. But those challenges are not the same in Lagos as in London.

In the coming decades, as cities across Africa, south and east Asia rapidly expand, their city administrations will have a dominant influence over how people live sustainably.

The context for policymaking is different and more diverse across these regions than in Europe or North America. That means policymakers have to use different methods and approaches to satisfy a complex triple bottom line of developing, growing and becoming more sustainable.

For our third instalment of Design&Delivery, we asked the question: what does it take to design and deliver policy through the adversities many emerging cities face?

We were joined by Jagan Shah, currently the director for Artha Global’s Centre for Emerging Cities and previously the head of India’s National Institute for Urban Affairs. Dr. Yakama Jones (Delivery Associates), an experienced delivery leader currently working with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation in Freetown, Sierra Leone, also shared her insights.

Adversity as a context for policymaking

The title of this session was ‘delivering urban policy through adversity’. Jagan Shah explained what that context of adversity looks like for urban policymakers in India.

• A lack of powers: This is a common challenge for city leaders worldwide, but it’s pronounced in India, where provincial governments have been slow to devolve constitutional powers in recent decades. Many urban leaders lack the authority to manage the development of their communities.
• A lack of people: Another common global challenge. Cities are often at the cutting edge of policy innovation, but they can struggle to fully staff their bureaucracies with people who have the experience and expertise required to deliver these programmes.
• A lack of funds: The constitutional constraints on Indian cities translates to a lack of financial independence. Their peers in South Africa and Brazil control five times as much in tax revenues.

India has a lot of cities — more than 4,000. In 2015, a new government launched the Smart Cities Mission [SCM], a high-profile initiative to modernise India’s cities and accelerate economic growth. Shah said that he and his colleagues at the National Institute for Urban Affairs knew they “didn’t have time to completely refashion how cities are run.” Instead, they focused on designing an overarching policy approach, presented in the graphic below, which could help address some of the constraints facing cities.

By setting a common goal and focusing on delivering outcomes, building capabilities and strengthening markets, the [SCM] helped evolve urban policymaking in India. The following sections discuss each of these approaches.

Focus on delivering outcomes

The focus on delivering outcomes was driven by a hypothesis: if India’s cities could demonstrate their ability to grow and deliver prosperity — through better policy design and delivery — that would increase their political clout and encourage the devolution required to do even more.

Cities had to bid competitively to access $6bn in funding through the SCM. Their plans needed to demonstrate how they would fulfil the outcomes of sustainable development goal 11: to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

Shah’s team wanted to encourage urban policymakers to shift from monitoring inputs to measuring outcomes. He highlighted two approaches they tried to do this:

• Integrated plans for area-based development
• Sustained feedback loops

Integrate planning

One of the innovations in policy design the SCM introduced was a new way of conceptualising urban spaces in India. This meant introducing granularity into planning by thinking about areas and neighbourhoods rather than city master plans because “what really matters to people’s lives is the local area”.

That area-based approach to development required a new way of seeing the city: as a complex, integrated system of systems rather than an array of distinct policy pillars. Transport infrastructure and zoning laws may be organised in separate parts of a bureaucracy, but they interact and shape outcomes together in small areas across the city.

To bring that perspective to life, the SCM encouraged urban leaders to take on new areas of responsibility — such as coordinating local mobility, energy and surveillance — as “testing grounds” where they could see how these factors interact and influence each other.

Sustain feedback loops

Citizen engagement is another way policymakers can move from monitoring inputs to measuring outcomes. But it’s hard to do, as the experience in India shows.

Shah said that the SCM enjoyed early successes in citizen engagement: “It started off with millions of people contributing their opinions of what their city needed.” But they struggled to sustain this.

In part, Shah argued, that’s because there isn’t a legacy of citizen-centred policymaking in India at the national or local level. Government has tended to be quite hierarchical, and the capabilities to manage a more two-way relationship are still emerging.

Several cities have experimented with digital apps and online surveys. While these solutions are innovative and cost-effective, they can alienate communities with limited or no internet access — which is around half of the Indian population.

Use delivery units to build capacity

As administrative organisations, cities need the capacity to deliver the policies they design. That starts with having the right people in place. It’s an issue that Dr. Yakama Jones highlighted when talking about her work in Sierra Leone — the lack of qualified health professionals is a major constraint on the health system.

In India, Shah’s team in central government found that many of the city administrations they were meant to give money to didn’t have key staff like environmental officers or experienced financial offers to manage a complex grant process.

That is part of why the SCM uses development corporations as local delivery units. The approach is not without critics or concerns, but Shah argued that, over time, there has been “wider acceptance that these companies can really help the cities move the needle in terms of delivery.”

Stregnthen markets

India’s requirement for infrastructure investment this decade is at least $500bn. As in many emerging economies, it’s a tall order for the public sector to pay for everything. But encouraging private sector investment is a process with its own considerations.

Shah pointed out that, as a market economy, India is just a few decades old. Part of the work city governments have to do to attract private investment for financially sustainable development is to strengthen local markets. Shah shared three strands to this approach, illustrated below, but focused on the first: digital transparency.

There are historic concerns about the integrity of some public institutions in India. Shah argued that automating more processes — reducing human intermediation — enhances transparency and builds trust and confidence.

Digitalised processes can create more secure audit trails and improve efficiency. Automation also makes licencing processes for businesses faster and cheaper, said Shah, which makes investment more attractive.

Eight years after it was launched, the Smart City Mission is still in progress — around 70% of the nearly 8,000 planned projects have been completed; the pandemic caused major disruption. The challenges facing urban policymakers in India will be familiar to peers around the world, especially in emerging economies. Shah’s three-pronged approach — delivering outcomes to increase clout, building capabilities and strengthening markets — could be a blueprint to adopt and adapt.

More Design&Delivery?

• You can watch Dr. Yakama Jones and Jagan Shah’s remarks in full.
• You can also download a copy of Shah’s presentation.
• Sign-up for updates about our next Design&Delivery session.
• Or read about our July event, on adaptive policymaking.