Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs

India spent heavily on smart upgrades in its cities under the Smart Cities Mission. Lighting, waterfronts, signage, mobility, public spaces. The Ministry wanted an answer to a question that spending alone cannot settle: did any of it change what a visitor experiences, and did more visitors come?

That is harder than it sounds. The upgrades differ city by city, they landed over several years, and tourism numbers move for reasons that have nothing to do with a streetscape. So the study had to come at the question from more than one direction, and be honest about what each direction could carry.

I led the assessment with a doctoral co-investigator and a team of interns. It had three parts.

First, a national questionnaire to the offices of 94 smart cities, capturing what each city believed it had built and where it thought the effect had landed. That is the supply side, in the cities’ own words.

Second, tourist footfall for Varanasi, Srinagar and Jaipur from 2001 to 2023/24, compared before and after the Mission. Three cities with very different tourism bases, and a series long enough to show the trend the Mission arrived into rather than only the years after it.

Third, primary research with tourists in those three cities: a survey of 1,075 visitors, 22 in-depth interviews in Varanasi, and a regression linking upgrade themes to tourist satisfaction. That is the part that speaks to experience rather than to volume.

Alongside it, a student project scraped traveller reviews for five cities, and I made site visits to each of the three focal cities, because a waterfront reads differently in person than in a completion report.

I delivered inception, interim and final reports. The project completion form, signed on 8 December 2025, records that the project fully met its stated objectives and was completed as per plan.

Three cities describe three cities. The footfall comparison establishes what happened around the Mission rather than attributing it, the satisfaction model is correlational and seasonal, and the 94-city questionnaire records what cities say about their own projects.

Those boundaries are stated in the reports, because a study that answers a ministry’s question is worth more when it says which parts of the answer are firm.