Challenges of consultant-led planning in India's smart cities mission

The growing involvement of private-sector consultants in urban planning has been critiqued as a potential problem, mainly due to doubts over their ethical position. India's Smart Cities Mission which aims to equip 100 cities with smart technologies, relies on private consultants both to plan the interventions and to implement them. With the planning phase now complete, and implementation in its early stages, this study examines the proposals generated by the consultants. The study deploys natural language processing computational techniques to compare a large corpus of text extracted from the proposal documents to a framework of common planning terms. The analysis yields insights regarding the consultants' "styles," and the evolution of the proposals over four rounds of selection. Findings suggest that some consultants show better results than others, but as many as a third of the reports prepared for the mission have low scores on the study's metrics. In addition, a close reading of the program design helps understand the institutional context within which consultants are embedded. The paper concludes with recommendations for closer scrutiny of the consultants' work within the mission.