Smart Cities: 9 years on, over 20% of the cities have 25% of the work pending

Smart city mission may yet again miss the date

The Smart Cities Mission may again miss its completion deadline of March 31, 2025, as 25 percent of the projects are still pending as of July 2024 in 22 of the 100 cities, according to a Moneycontrol analysis of data from the Lok Sabha and the Smart Cities Mission dashboard.

In 13 cities, the work has either been completed or nearing completion, but in eight over a third of the projects are pending. In 59 cities, over 10 percent of projects are ongoing.

The government, on August 28, announced that it will create an additional 12 industrial smart cities to spur manufacturing, besides the eight that are already in various stages of completion.

These 20 cities are being developed in addition to the 100 selected under the smart city mission, which was started in 2015.

Big projects remain

The data shows that while 90 percent of the projects have been completed, several large projects are still ongoing. While the government has been able to complete 7,241 projects worth Rs 1.45 lakh crore, 776 projects worth Rs 18,987 crore remain in the pipeline.

At Rs 20.1 crore, the average value of completed projects was 20 percent less than the average value of pending projects, at Rs 24.5 crore.

The data further indicates that of the 91 cities which have some projects ongoing, 48 had pending projects which were higher in value than completed projects.

Higher value projects tend to have higher cost overruns. A government report released last month found that projects costing over Rs 150 crore had cost overruns of over 20 percent. The average time delay in large projects was nearly three years.

If we consider the cost of the project, 25 cities are yet to reach 75 percent completion milestone.

Among the larger states, Telangana had the lowest completion rate of 60.7 percent, while Jharkhand had 100 percent completion, and Odisha and Karnataka had  97 percent completion.