Challenges and opportunities in smart city implementation in Tier-2 India based on evidence from Aligarh

India’s Smart Cities Mission (SCM) aims to transform 100 cities through digitally enabled and sustainable urban environments in alignment with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11. Despite substantial investment in implementing the SCM, scholarly research on its implementation in Tier-2 cities remains relatively limited. To explore this gap, this study adopts a concurrent mixed-methods design to investigate SCM implementation in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, integrating questionnaire data from 170 residents, twelve semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and secondary data evidence from academic literature and official documents. As the questionnaire employed online sampling, respondents were disproportionately urban, educated and digitally literate. Consequently, the quantitative findings should be interpreted as indicative of the digitally connected population rather than representative of Aligarh's wider citizenry. Multiple regression analysis (R 2 = 0.63) among the digitally connected subsample identifies community engagement (β = 0.23) and awareness of SCM initiatives (β = 0.26) as the strongest associations with citizen satisfaction, followed by technology adoption attitudes (β = 0.18), infrastructure satisfaction (β = 0.20) and perceived public–private partnership effectiveness (β = 0.15).Community engagement also demonstrates the strongest association with technology adoption attitudes (r = 0.59), underscoring the importance of participatory governance. Qualitative and documentary evidence, interpreted through an institutional-capacity perspective encompassing individual, institutional and environmental dimensions, reveals a persistent structural–functional implementation gap, reinforced by overlapping responsibilities between the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) and municipal authorities, uneven organisational capacity and unequal digital access. The study adds empirical insights from a Tier-2 Indian city by demonstrating how interacting institutional-capacity constraints shape SCM implementation, providing contextually grounded insights for structurally comparable cities. Although limited by a non-probability, digitally skewed sample and a single-case, cross-sectional design, the findings offer contextually grounded diagnostic insights for structurally comparable Tier-2 cities, while underscoring the importance of strengthening governance institutional capacity, coordination and inclusive digital participation.