Cities are home to more than 50% of the world’s population while occupying only around 3% of the land (United Nations, n.d.). Migration to cities due to the economic opportunities they provide will continue, with close to 68% of the global population projected to reside in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2018).
The United Nations has recognised this transition, with Sustainable Development Goal 11 aiming to “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable by providing accessible transportation, supporting economic linkages between peri-urban and urban areas and integrated policies” by 2030 (United Nations, n.d.). This ambitious target can only be achieved if policymakers make informed decisions based on data-driven insights into evolving urban systems. However, these insights are sorely lacking, especially in India, the world’s second-biggest urban system, with 11% of the total global urban population living in its cities.
As Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Aayog writes, “Urbanisation will be the single biggest agent of growth in the next few decades in India”; the UN estimates that around 416 million people will be added as urban dwellers in India between 2018 and 2050, and the country will be more than 50% urban by 2050 (Kant, 2022). Moreover, beyond their burgeoning populace, Indian cities are the country’s engines of economic growth, contributing close to 70% of its GDP (Mitra & Mehta, 2011).
Despite the importance of cities, their potential is unrealised due to poor urban governance, with issues of planning and management and poor implementation capacity. Indian cities are often sprawling and unorganised, with substandard infrastructure and outdated processes to manage them.
One of the key reasons for poor governance of Indian cities is the lack of organised open data systems.
One of the key reasons for poor governance of Indian cities is the lack of organised open data systems, a fact laid bare during the country’s response to COVID-19. The crisis devastated urban areas, revealing fundamental flaws in how city officials collected, disseminated, and used data in policy decisions. The COVID-19 crisis revealed how information gaps across sectors such as transport, public health, and social welfare led to subpar service delivery within Indian cities. For instance, lack of disaggregated spatial data on slums obscured any insight into their vulnerability or specific emergency needs (Sachdeva & Patel, 2022).
Urban India requires a post-COVID-19 plan to build systems that collect, disseminate, and utilise data to improve service delivery. Developing such ‘data-enabled cities’, as coined by the Open Data Institute (ODI), will also improve policymakers’ transparency and accountability, lead to better decision making, and ultimately, enable innovation in urban governance (Snaith et al, 2021). Through a mix of open data and transparency around urban planning and policymaking, officials would be able to build a wider ecosystem of skilled partners, overcoming internal capacity issues, as well as catalysing innovative solutions. For instance, start-up hubs, public-private partnerships, and data challenge programmes can lead to collaborations between various stakeholders for solving problems in Indian cities, wherein each of them has an incentive to participate in the project. Developing citizen engagement platforms such as vTaiwan and Decidim (Barcelona) would help planners communicate directly with residents most affected by their proposed urban plans. Moreover, many cities are now ‘planning for openness’ –Glasgow announced that its urban plans were based on the principles of open government (Glasgow City Council, n.d.); Helsiniki has based its city operating model on openness and transparency.
Building solid open data ecosystems should also help future-proof cities and form the backbone of emerging technologies in city governance.
Building solid open data ecosystems should also help future-proof cities and form the backbone of emerging technologies in city governance. We seem to be rapidly approaching another industrial revolution in city governance with the advent of digital twin cities (DTC) (Deng et al, 2021). DTCs are essentially digital parallels which map physical entities. They have the potential to integrate existing technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Internet of Things, and 5G, among others. Indian cities should aim to lead such a revolution, given that they will house a signicant percentage of the global population – people whose quality of life must be improved while ensuring that their rights, such as privacy, are maintained.
Ultimately, policies directed at the growth of India’s urban open data ecosystems to build smart cities and conduct data-driven governance require analyses of the existing landscape. This paper attempts to fill that gap by investigating the state of urban open data in India through a people and data lens. First, we analyse the different stakeholders in the ecosystem, in terms of their power and interest in the ecosystem. Next, we discuss three major data aspects of the ecosystem that need improvement– the lack of open city datastores, data accessibility issues, and the limited use of new technologies, such as GIS, in urban governance. Using case studies, we demonstrate how improving these three data aspects can enhance decision-making in our cities. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings and present recommendations on how the urban open data ecosystem can be improved.
