This week marks the deadline for states to submit their smart city nominees. With cities likely to compete for the tag based on past performance, Chennai's track record raises several concerns.

A sizable chunk of the city is stuck in the previous century, in some ways. A majority of Chennai’s residents still queue up outside a counter for everything from paying electricity bills and property tax to buying their monthly travel passes.

Though the internet user base has doubled in the last four years, and nearly half of the city’s residents are supposedly online, web-based government services are either non-existent or challenging to use. In a city of six million, the number of people who use online portals to pay bills is in the modest thousands.

Miles to go

While the national conversation has revolved around building smart cities, Chennai remains defiantly un-smart – its buses don’t come fitted with GPS, the Metro won’t have a mobile app when it is launched next year, and plans for paperless government offices have largely been abandoned.

“Till a few weeks ago, I had to fill a paper form and supply proof of identity just to get a monthly railway pass,” says Raj Cherubal of Chennai City Connect. “India is supposed to be the IT capital of the world. But, the government doesn’t seem to have figured any of this out. In the modern world, nobody fills out forms anymore,” he adds.

In many ways, Chennai has actually regressed on the smartness scale. Using funds from the previous big budget urban renewal scheme, known by the acronym JNNURM, Chennai was supposed to install GPS devices in at least 1,000 public transport buses in order to provide real-time information on their location.

While money was spent to install them in nearly 600 buses by 2012, the city had a change of heart. “It was seen as a DMK project. So, we dropped it,” an official in the Metropolitan Transport Corporation says. Currently, less than 50 buses have GPS devices and real-time information remains a distant dream.

“The government is not thinking in terms of how to make life easy for citizens,” says Mr. Cherubal. “Even simple things haven’t been done. The city needs a Chief Technology Officer like in London or Singapore, who can come in and review government processes. We are not living in some primitive non-IT country,” he adds.

While Chennai has lagged behind, other cities are making swift progress. Delhi Police recently launched the country’s first city-centric mobile app; all of Bengaluru’s 6,500 buses can be tracked online by mid-2015, and Ahmedabad is building a network of free public Wi-Fi zones.

Nat Malupillai of the Bengaluru-based e-Governments Foundation, says: “Using technology effectively will increase citizen participation in governance too.” Making people come into a government office for mundane things is a drain on the city's resources too. “There should be a common portal for all utility payments, be it water, power or property tax. Online services should be the norm,” he adds.

Recent Case Studies