The Smart Cities Mission built Special Purpose Vehicles alongside municipal corporations to execute its plan. Swachh Bharat funded toilet construction but not the municipal revenue base required to maintain the toilets. Both missions had political backing. Both had central funding. Both had defined timelines. Both encountered the same institutional reality at the point of execution. What does the pattern reveal about the assumption at the heart of mission-mode programming?
The Smart Cities Mission required each city to create a Special Purpose Vehicle to execute the smart city plan. In practice, SPVs were staffed by deputed officers with limited tenure, limited domain expertise, and limited operational independence from the state government and municipal corporation whose cooperation they needed. The SPV model created a parallel structure rather than strengthening the existing one. Municipal corporations; the bodies constitutionally responsible for urban governance under the 74th Amendment; found themselves sidelined by entities operating alongside them without clear jurisdictional boundaries.
An SPV could commission a command centre but could not maintain the water supply network that determined whether the city actually functioned. The technology layer was installed on top of a governance layer that had not been reformed. Smart city proposals were often prepared by consultants for the competition phase, drafted to win selection rather than to be implementable.
Each mission sat alongside the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, Swachh Bharat, and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, each with its own funding stream and reporting chain. A Municipal Commissioner managing five central missions was not coordinating a unified urban strategy. She was managing five separate reporting relationships.
Swachh Bharat Mission deserves a different assessment. It achieved something genuinely significant. Urban open defecation rates declined dramatically. Millions of toilets were constructed. SwachhSurvekshan created competitive incentives that yielded visible results in frontrunners like Indore and Surat. The question is not whether it achieved progress. It did. The question is why the progress did not reach intended scale and durability. Toilets were built but in many cases without adequate water connections or sewerage linkage. A toilet without a functional water supply is infrastructure without a service.
Community toilets fell into disrepair because Urban Local Bodies lacked the revenue and staffing to maintain them. The Mission funded construction. It did not build the municipal revenue model required for perpetual maintenance. Of approximately 2,400 legacy landfill sites identified for remediation under SBM-U 2.0, over a thousand still lack approved remediation action plans. Remediation is expensive, and counterpart financing from states and ULBs is often unavailable.
Both missions converge on the same structural constraint: urban missions designed at the central level depend for execution on municipal institutions that have not been adequately empowered, funded, or reformed. Most municipal corporations remain financially dependent on state transfers. Technical staff vacancies run at levels that would be considered emergency in any other context. The funding architecture addressed capital expenditure without addressing the municipal revenue and staffing base required to sustain the assets after the mission period closed.
The constraint is not in intent. It is in institutional design: programmes designed for the urban India that policy aspires to create, executed in the urban India that currently exists. The missions could have been designed with a municipal capacity-building component as a precondition, not an afterthought. The maintenance and operational sustainability of assets could have been built into the funding architecture from the beginning; Swachh Bharat funded toilet construction but not the municipal revenue systems needed to maintain them. The concurrent running of multiple urban missions with overlapping mandates but separate reporting could have been consolidated under a single urban transformation framework. These are not criticisms of the missions' ambition. They are observations about how institutional design at the operational level determines whether political will and central funding translate into sustained outcomes on the ground.