Study title

This data collection is comprised of interviews with Smart City stakeholders and actors across four Smart Cities in India as well as a set of interviews with national-level actors in Delhi. These interviews took place between September 2018 and October 2019 and are a reflection of the nationally-led Smart City Mission from 2015-2020. The cities represented include Jaipur, Bengaluru, Kochi, Indore, and Delhi.This research has two primary aims. The first is to develop cutting edge, theoretically informed, insights into the nature of mobility governance reform and the potential to generate more sustainable urban mobility in India. The combined pressures of a growing urban population, increasing urban sprawl, and rapidly rising income, coupled with inadequate public transport, lack of coordinated infrastructure, and increased motorisation have placed huge and unequal burdens on India's urban areas. This has resulted in highly congested roads, poor air quality, high pedestrian casualty rates and poor accessibility and quality of life particularly for the urban poor. In this context, redesigning urban mobility governance has been identified as a critical element of progress in delivering more inclusive and economically, environmentally and socially sustainable cities in India (MoUD, 2006, MoUD, 2015 and NITI Aayog, 2017). Efforts to reform urban transport governance, primarily through the bolstering of local-level capacity, have been underway in India since 2006 but with limited affect due to lack of meaningful delegation of authority and financial power. However, in 2015 the Indian national government launched the Smart Cities Mission, aimed at going beyond what has been achieved before at the local level. The focus of the initiative is to promote 'cities that provide core infrastructure and give a decent quality of life to its citizens' through the application of 'Smart' Solutions (MoUD, 2015, p5). Within this context then, this research uses the Smart Cities...