Smart City Projects in India : Issues and Challenges

India has seen massive growth in its urban population in the recent decades. Government and policy makers are facing challenges such as increase in urban population from rural areas and huge gaps in infrastructure. Smart city would be a city with facilities like smart people, smart technology, smart energy, smart transportation, smart IT and communication and above all smart governance. This paper is an attempt to focus on the key issues and the challenges to develop new cities or improve the infrastructure facilities in our existing cities which are over populated and not properly managed. Further, this paper also focuses on the challenges in financing smart city projects in India. Government of India has recently made the Smart Cities Mission under which 100 smart cities would be made. Several initiatives are being led by the Government of India to convert 100 Cities into Smart Cities. The possible choices for smart city financing could be PPP, Debt financing, FDI and Viability gap funding. The government could use PPP Route and could also encourage FDI for effective implementation of Smart Cities Project in India