Barriers to the Development of Smart Cities in Indian Context

Abstract

Smart city development is gaining considerable recognition in the systematic literature and international policies throughout the world. The study aims to identify the key barriers of smart cities from a review of existing literature and views of experts in this area. This work further makes an attempt on the prioritisation of barriers to recognise the most important barrier category and ranking of specific barriers within the categories to the development of smart cities in India. Through the existing literature, this work explored 31 barriers of smart cities development and divided them into six categories. This research work employed fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to prioritise the selected barriers. Findings reveal that 'Governance' is documented as the most significant category of barriers for smart city development followed by 'Economic; 'Technology'; 'Social'; 'Environmental' and 'Legal and Ethical'. In this work, authors also performed sensitivity analysis to validate the findings of study. This research is useful to the government and policymakers for eradicating the potential interferences in smart city development initiatives in developing countries like India.

Smart City Governance in Developing Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Many developing countries are falling behind developed economies in terms of technologyrelated infrastructure readiness, and this poses an imminent challenge to smart city adoption [33,51,66,84]. The level of technology-related infrastructure development is heterogeneous among developing countries, and the issues encountered are also different, ranging from lack of internet penetration [33] and lack of internet connection for business information exchange in Ghana [66] to the lack of local technical capacity to develop the core technologies needed to drive smart city development [51].…”

“…Fragmented authority across various public institutions also presents as a barrier to smart city development in developing countries [28,33,49,77,84]. As smart city development involves multiple stakeholders from a variety of public and private sectors, forming strong partnerships and having a central authority to steer the entire development process is crucial.…”

“…As smart city development involves multiple stakeholders from a variety of public and private sectors, forming strong partnerships and having a central authority to steer the entire development process is crucial. The lack of unifying strategies for smart cities led by a central authority [33] and the lack of coordination and cooperation among a city's operational networks [77,84] inhibit the efforts of governments to roll out smart city projects swiftly and effectively. In India, many smart city projects have been launched independently by different agencies at the state and city levels, and these plans were often not coordinated by a central authority.…”

“…Lack of governance frameworks and regulatory safeguards is another major barrier identified in smart city development in developing countries [51,55,[73][74][75]77,84]. While many developing countries are riding the bandwagon of smart city development for socioeconomic gain, there is essentially a lack of clear governance frameworks specifying the policy objectives, development strategies, regulatory norms, and evaluation models of smart city development in many cities in developing countries [55,73,84].…”

“…Lack of skilled human capital, especially citizens that are adept in handling technology-enabled functional roles, is another major barrier in smart city development in developing countries [33,37,40,43,44,78,84]. In developing countries, the spectrum of skills sets lacking in smart city development includes the lack of formal skills in ICT [37], the lack of technology-related skills among the bureaucrats [40], and the lack of technical knowledge among planners [84]. In India, the government's capacity in smart city development has been hampered by a skills deficit, as the country has not been producing a sufficient number of planners evenly distributed across its various cities [43].…”