India’s Smart City Mission Through the Lens of Sustainable Development Goals

India is currently undergoing a severe process of urban transformation. An area-based strategic approach popularly coined as “Smart Cities Mission” is critical to urban transformation and change. Although the SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS and the Smart Cities Mission in India resonate with the same goal of developing quality, reliable, sustainable, and resilient infrastructure to improve human lives, the “SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS” rarely emerge within India’s Smart Cities Mission discourse. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS comprise a holistic approach to achieve the equipoise for the human beings on this planet. India’s approach to making each city more livable by increasing its economic growth, developing the local areas, and harnessing technology to achieve more innovative outcomes. This approach is giving birth to another discourse, a prototype creation approach. That creates conflict with the idea of SDG, which nurtures the notion of heterogeneity. India’s Smart City Mission is a robust implementation mechanism to achieve SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS consciously or unconsciously, knowingly and unknowingly. This work will explore and demonstrate the possibilities of India’s Smart Cities Mission as a powerful tool for achieving SDG and also capture its present trajectory. Discourse analysis will be one of the critical methods while examining the ground situation of the Smart City projects taken up in the past 5 years (FY2015–16 to FY2019–20).