Seeing into the entropic state: Smart cities and COVID-19 management in Kerala

Abstract

The Integrated Command and Control Centre (IC3) has emerged as a key component of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) in India. Although the mission has been widely critiqued, IC3s were used for communications, resource allocation and inter-departmental coordination in many cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study, based in the state of Kerala, uses in-depth interviews with personnel who were actively involved in the pandemic response, along with secondary data, to examine how the IC3 was used. The research finds that the vision of digital transformation and centralisation is reinterpreted by various layers of the state. The paper propounds the idea of the ‘entropic state’ to explain the situation where state agencies are able to act synergistically in an emergency, but default back to misalignment and internal competition once the crisis has passed.