| |November 20199infrastructure development, which have served to divert migration to the larger cities.These smaller cities also offer the important advantage of cheaper real estate prices and a lower cost of liv-ing. Their reappearance on develop-ers' and investors' radars is helping to spread real estate development and demand more uniformly across the country, while decreasing the pres-sure on the overly-burdened metros and tier 1 cities.Smart Cities - snail-like progressOne of the most important drivers of new real estate demand for many of these smaller cities has been their in-clusion in the Government of India's ambitious Smart Cities program, which, at least in theory bodes very well for their real estate markets. While many of the bigger cities have also managed to enlist themselves under the Smart City scheme, it is, in fact, the smaller city contenders who have managed to show some visible progress.Overall, it can safely be said that the Smart Cities program has not re-ally unfolded as was initially expect-ed and hoped for. As of now, only 2% of the 9,943 crore released un-der the smart city mission have been utilized, and only 5% of the pro-posed projects are completed. This does raise questions about whether the development of smart cities by 2020 is a realistic expectation.To be fair, there are various bot-tlenecks preventing speedy imple-mentation of these projects. Similar projects are implemented at a much faster speed in developed countries. Some of the challenges in India are doubtlessly related to hard issues such as land acquisition, buy-in from resistant stakeholders, and so on. However, there is also the factor of political will to back up the vision.Apart from the slow implemen-tation, it is also a fact that smart citizens are ­ at least in theory - an integral part of the smart city eco-system. With more active citizen participation in such Government initiatives at the implementation and not only in end-user level, the pace of Smart City development in India could theoretically be faster.The tier 2/tier 3 Smart City advantageAs an interesting adjunct to this state of affairs, it has been the smaller cit-ies that have shown faster progress on the Smart Cities map. This could have any number of reasons: · They have more to gain· They face fewer challenges in terms of resistance to change· They have less densified urbaniza-tion patterns to work with · There are fewer challenges when it comes to land acquisition.· Many have the advantage of stronger local political will.The recent smart city rankings by the Ministry of Urban Develop-ment, also reveal the same. The tier 2 smart cities of Nagpur (score: 259.96), Vadodara (score: 195.31) and Ahmedabad (score: 190.59) topped the charts, leaving behind tier 1 cities such as Pune, Chennai and many others.The rankings included 87 cities out of the 99 smart cities (the re-maining 12 were not evaluated due to the recentness of their inclusion into the smart cities mission list) and were made based on parameters such as project implementation, expendi-ture, and performance of civic bod-ies in the past 4 years.As already mentioned, smaller cities have more to gain from the Smart Cities program, and a strong, determined local Government can push the necessary reforms much more expediently in these smaller cities than those in the metros. Of course, the larger cities are invari-ably already massively congested, thereby presenting huge roadblocks to the deployment of the requisite Smart City ingredients.However, it is also a fact that political elements may be heavily in-vested in maintaining the status quo. This is especially true in cities which have large slum areas.In shortSmaller cities have fewer challenges to overcome on the road to becom-ing Smart Cities, a lot more to gain from the generous funds that have been deployed for the select cities, and may have the benefit of more progress-oriented local governing bodies which are truly invested in the betterment of their cities. Smaller cities have more to gain from the Smart Cities program, and a strong, determined local Government can push the necessary reforms much more expediently in these smaller cities than those in the metros
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