Urban governance, technologically equipped citizens, and their (non) participation in the Indian smart cities of Bhubaneswar and Bhopal

India's Smart Cities Mission (SCM) asserts to provide participatory spaces to its citizens for urban governance. Adding to these discourses, scholars reflect on smart citizens, assuming they are technologically equipped to benefit from the SCM. However, there is a lack of detailed empirical account of the technologically equipped Indian citizen’s experience of the nature and provision of these participatory spaces within smart cities. Hence, the paper explores the nature of technologically equipped citizen participation (or non-participation) within Indian smart cities’ participatory spaces. The categories of citizen participation and experience will help understand the factors influencing stakeholder engagement. We draw from Cardullo and Kitchin's (Geo Journal 84:1–13, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-018-9845-8) ‘Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation’ to assess the Indian context, in which we focus on the technologically equipped citizens of the smart cities of Bhubaneswar and Bhopal, primarily for their citizen-centric proposals. Between January and July 2022, an online survey was conducted of 252 participants representing the technologically equipped urban population of the two selected cities. The data was analysed using quantitative descriptive statistics and summative content analysis. In inference, the study highlights that 'propertied citizenship' does not correspond to active citizen participation in urban governance in the two cities. The study identifies this propertied, technologically equipped citizen typology as Nishkriya or passive citizens. Thus, the study suggests that even for a technologically equipped citizen, the city and governance structures need to put in place structures for participation that are meaningful and long-term.