Tathagata CHATTERJI, XIM University Bhubaneswar, India
This paper reviews India’s National Urban Digital Mission which seeks to bring a transformative change in urban governance practices by putting in place indicator driven performance monitoring systems. Digitalisation of city services has become a national level policy priority to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and in recent years several new initiatives were taken. In 2015, the Smart Cities Mission was launched, with an aspirational agenda of bringing in transformative change in 100 cities through big-data intensive techno-managerial interventions. The Covid crisis has further accelerated the digital push and underscored the need for high quality granular city level data to effectively intervene in crisis times. In 2020, three key city level benchmarking indices, namely: Municipal Performance Index, Ease of Living Index and Climate-Smart Cities Index were compiled. Subsequently, the National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM) was launched in 2021. The architecture of NUDM includes various sub-components: a governance platform designed to monitor the performance of municipal governments against key targets: an open-source software platform designed to facilitate data exchange between various data platforms, data producers and consumers; and a learning platform to facilitate capacity building and peer to peer learning. Parallelly, a composite SDG Urban Index for 56 cities was also launched in 2021. Reviewing the scope of these data platforms and city performance indicators, this paper argues that the platform-driven data monitoring mechanism at the national level offers good opportunities to measure the performance of cities and facilitate evidence-based decision making. However, to realise the potential of indicator driven national urban frameworks and apply such monitoring systems to achieve drive SDG targets, it is essential to focus on augmenting comprehensive urban management capabilities of the city governments and undertake state-level reforms.
Mots clés : Urban digital platforms|Sustainable Development Goals|Smart Cities|National Urban Digital Mission
A103372TC