Media365
Dream projects are common in Indian politics. Almost every politician has a dream project that often becomes an extension of their persona. The Smart Cities Mission was the biggest dream project in Indian history, and now that the Mission has ended, its record invites closer scrutiny. Can politicians just dream up urban development projects? A critical inquiry into the SCM reveals that political dreaming cannot be allowed to masquerade as urban planning.
Dream projects tend to begin with advertisements of radical transformation that prove their feasibility through state narratives, rather than expert input or citizen experience — often even before the first brick is laid. The SCM was no different.
The SCM was sold as a future-facing vision of urban India through narratives of integrated command centres, digitisation, and selected pockets of redevelopment. It promised to deliver urban development across the diverse landscape of India under the vague quality of smartness. This vagueness made SCM powerful as a political narrative. It allowed governments to package very different interventions under a single glamorous label and circulate them as proof of modern governance. It was an effective national public-relations machine.
Like all other dream projects, the image of promised transformation was sustained through the device of the showcase. The Mission’s Area-Based Development model concentrated resources in bounded precincts where rapid visual change could be staged and photographed as transformation. For example, a 2025 study by Sarbeswar Praharaj found that, across the 100 cities, SCM interventions reached less than 10 per cent of the population, and in 41 cities, the ABD area covered less than 10 per cent of municipal territory and just 5 per cent of total population. In cities such as Ludhiana, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur, areas affecting only 0.5 per cent of the city received around 20 per cent of total investment. In other words, the mission produced enclaves of display and then promoted those enclaves as the city.
Dream projects, therefore, privilege what can be seen over what is needed, what can be inaugurated over what is sustainable, and what can be advertised over what citizens experience. While a command-and-control centre, a “smart” road, or a digitally branded service platform travels well in photographs and speeches, cities are made habitable through good drainage, affordable housing, and ward-level repair. Sadly, they do not make good visual material.
Dream projects tend to be top-down in their approach. They tend to fit the city to the politician’s dream, rather than let local needs guide project formulation. And hence, they weaken local governance. The SCM worked similarly. Projects were routed through Special Purpose Vehicles that operated as parallel structures to local bodies. The SPVs were justified by the claim that municipalities lacked capacity.
But instead of strengthening local bodies or building that capacity, the SCM worked around them. This reproduced a familiar constitutional weakness and simply recreated the greatest problem in Indian urbanism: That the third tier remains the weakest, urban local bodies are fiscally dependent, and key decisions continue to be shaped by state and central actors. The people who best understood local conditions did not have decisive authority under the SCM, and the project did nothing to change that.
This centralised nature of dream projects ignores an important reality, as dreams do. Indian cities do not suffer from one generic problem awaiting one generic solution. Chennai’s flood risk, Surat’s industrial expansion, Guwahati’s uneven growth, Jaipur’s heritage pressures, Bengaluru’s mobility crisis, and small-city deficits are contextually rooted issues.
Predictably, then, SCM struggled to address local needs. It encouraged cities to retrofit themselves to a nationally legible template of “smartness”. It privileged roads, parking, digitised monitoring, and visible capital works over the everyday infrastructures on which most residents depend. For instance, a 2021 study by Bajpai and Biberman found that nearly 40 per cent of Smart Cities transport funding went to roads and parking, compared to only 2 per cent for buses.
This brings us to a critical point. For their rhetorical work, dream projects implement a distinct visual politics. They are often represented from above – through drone footage, aerial panoramas, and before-and-after imagery that showcase mastery over landscape, showing urban development as an image of command.
This perspective is not accidental. From the air, the project appears like a coherent success — the dream made true — while the experience of citizens on the ground or the displacement that the project might have caused never makes the cut. Citizens then enter the frame not as citizens with agency, or authors of planning or users of the city, but merely as dots in the drone shots or moving images — proof that the dream has been realised.
This is probably the most corrosive feature of dream projects. They treat people as an audience, sometimes even as props, rather than as citizens with knowledge and claims. Participation becomes procedural or theatrical. Consultations are often held much after the direction has been dreamt of. Dashboards invite complaints, but in the face of weakened local bodies, those complaints cannot be equitably handled. And eventual inaugurations visually include the public in the success narrative while excluding them from the actual workings or visions of the project. Citizens merely validate the symbol of development. They don’t shape its content, and can never narrate its failures.
Fortunately, the Indian urban experience also offers a different tradition. Projects that have worked better are often those that were not announced as someone’s dream. Odisha’s Jaga Mission, initiatives by federations such as SPARC, NSDF, and Mahila Milan have succeeded because they worked from the ground upwards. They addressed daily use and social context. But these efforts are less photogenic, less centralised, and less suited to political mythmaking. They are, but, democratic and durable.
Let me be clear. This is not an argument against aspiration. Cities need aspiration. They need vision. Aspiration makes us ask better questions about what collective life could become. But aspiration begins in inquiry and curiosity; it is tested against evidence, revised through professional expertise, and made answerable to situated knowledge.
A dream, by definition, is detached from reality. It begins with a finished image and then demands that reality be rearranged to validate it.
Most post-mortems of SCM have shied away from this fundamental problem. Dreaming by a politician is not planning. It privileges charisma over diagnosis, visibility over equity, and legacy over expertise.
Building castles in the air is not the problem. We must dream. But as the American essayist Henry Thoreau said, we must then put foundations beneath them. The Smart Cities Mission did the reverse. It spent a decade suspending a (glamorous) urban future in the air while too often leaving the (boring) foundations of city life unattended. The French poet Paul Valéry gave more humbling advice: “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up,” he said.
Let go of dreams – not because cities should abandon ambition, but because they deserve something more demanding than fantasy. They deserve the discipline of waking up.
Zuberi is a PhD Scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes on history, politics, architecture and cities
