Does Smart City Development Promote Urbanization in India?

Abstract

The recent explosion of urbanization is mainly driven by the developing countries in the world. Therefore, urban planners in less developed countries face huge pressure to create planned urbanization which includes the higher provision of infrastructure and basic public services. The part of this planned urbanization ‘smart city’ development is one of the important initiatives taken by many countries and India is one of them. In terms of the size of the urban population through India ranked the second position in the world but in terms of the percentage of the urban population, it ranks very low. Therefore, to promote the urbanization Government of India (GoI) has taken ‘Smart Cities Mission’ initiatives for 100 cities in 2015. In this context, the present chapter quantitatively assesses the impact of smart city development on the urbanization in India. Urbanization is measured by the size, density, and growth rate of the population of the smart cities. On the other hand, we use factor analysis to create infrastructure index by considering city level total road length, number of latrines, water supply capacities, number of electricity connections, hospitals, schools, colleges, universities, banks, and credit societies. OLS regression analysis suggests that infrastructure has a strong positive effect on urbanization. Therefore, the smart city mission is very much essential for the promotion of urbanization in India. Finally, we suggest that we need to have more smart cities in the future so that a higher rate of urbanization promotes higher and sustainable economic growth.