Exploring Adoption of Technology and Innovations Amidst Evolving Smart Cities of India

The Smart City Mission (SCM) in India was initiated in 2015 to support liveability and economic growth alongside sustainable development. Smart cities are in focus for growth—expanding in population and economic infrastructure, contributing to a rising Indian GDP. Our qualitative exploration reveals applied innovations and technology across six thematic smart capabilities in (a) economy, (b) environment, (c) governance, (d) human capital, (e) living and (f) mobility. The research examines public narratives and multi-modal data across 230 technology/innovation-enabled scaled initiatives spanning 22 pioneering and award-winning smart cities of India. A data pool is generated and analysed with automations having natural language capabilities alongside conventional coding of narratives. The methodological novelty of applying analytics and exploration prompts to generate natural language responses is useful in multi-modal qualitative unstructured data analysis and research. The India-centric exploration indicates specificities on how embracing digital/emergent technologies and innovations drives the SCM. Observations indicate the adoption of a wide range of technologies, including core enablers like big data, cloud, telecom, information communication and technology (ICT) networks, cybersecurity, command centres, artificial intelligence (AI), among others, alongside interface technologies like mobile/social apps, sensors and cameras, platforms, internet of things and other machine interactions for citizen engagements. Open coding across the six smart capabilities reveals 32 associated sub-themes to understand technology deployment focus, practices, readiness, challenges and sustainable outcomes. The findings synthesize technology/innovation adoption focus, actionable insights across smart cities in India and contribute towards enabling technology-driven governance and policy formulations, managing stakeholder expectations and involvements including citizen collaborations and forging public–private partnerships, purposeful ecosystems for sustainable development, digital transformations and technology leverage.