Indian Smart Cities: rescaling and digitising local government in India

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My doctoral thesis on the Smart Cities Mission in India, entitled 'Homegrown Smart Cities: Empowering or deregulating Indian municipal government?,' studied the disparity between articulations of the Mission by exploring the flows and contestations of power in municipal government after the implementation of the Smart Cities Mission. I focused on smart cities in India and specifically on one case study - the city of Pune in western India. Through this postdoctoral fellowship I propose to expand my work on smart cities through the use of critical legal geography as a conceptual framework. As a geographer, I propose to work within the interdisciplinary space of the Law Department at Birkbeck, University of London, with Prof. Stewart Motha as my mentor. I relied on a mixed-methodology of elite interviews with elected representatives, bureaucratic officers, and activists, at the federal level and at the local level in my case study site of Pune, combined with archival research and web scraping of governmental websites and social media towards establishing the modality and flows of power within the complex web of interscalar governmental hierarchies and hybrid parastatal agencies that are government-owned corporate entities but have 'a market orientation in their financial discretion, internal organizational flexibility, and lower levels of citizen participation and accountability' towards unpacking how the Smart Cities Mission landed in and affected local government seven years after the Mission had been launched in 2015. My research drew from the disciplines of social anthropology, with a specific focus on bureaucracy and anthropology of the state, and critical urban studies to unpack the Mission. My doctoral research deviated from these readings of the Mission and established two novel contributions to the wider literature on Indian smart cities - 1) that we should reframe the Smart Cities Mission as a process of a colonial and postcolonial rescaling of local government; and 2), that we need to understand the Smart Cities Mission through the lens of the heterogenous 'state' and by complicating the artificial division between 'corporate' and 'state' entities within the context of local government in India.This proposal draws on my own doctoral research, as a human geographer, on the Smart cities Mission with the intention of consolidating the existing thesis into peer-reviewed published papers and extending a small part of my research on the digital interventions by the Smart Cities Mission that were impeded by the Covid-19 pandemic in India. The first part of this proposal (amounting to 75 percent of this proposal) focuses on expanding the legal geography readings of the Smart Cities Mission where I establish that rather than viewing the Mission as a novel intrusion into local democratic government it is important to historicize local democratic government and acknowledge that the Republic of India has a longer trajectory of paternalistic legal and legislative history of local administration that emerges as a recursive pattern of dialectic processes of expanding and contracting rights of citizens and local elected representatives that date back to the late 19th century. The second component of my field research is focused data governance. The Mission was supposed to digitize communication by encouraging a process of platformization of governmental services. The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted my fieldwork, and my contacts became primary respondents during the pandemic, and I was unable to contact them. Through this post-doctoral fellowship, I propose to spend 25 percent of my time on (online) interviews and capture this rapidly changing landscape of digital governance in India.