Uttar Pradesh leads in completion of smart city projects, shows data

It has been six years since the government launched the Smart City Mission, under which 100 cities were selected. The timeline to complete the programme was set to 2022, and was shifted to June 2023 last year.

A Business Standard analysis shows that of the 100 cities, only 14 have completed over 50 per cent of the projects in terms of value. Furthermore, five of those belong to Uttar Pradesh (UP). The other five in UP have a completion rate of over 30 per cent.

Varanasi had the highest completion rate of 87.1 per cent among all the cities. The city led the country with an 86.8 per cent completion rate in terms of the number of projects. From 106 projects at various stages of development in Varanasi, 92 had been completed as of March 28. Overall, 34 cities across all states had completed over half of their work.

The average completion rate across India was 47.2 per cent in terms of the number of projects and 28.3 per cent in value terms. UP led the country in the completion of smart city projects. The state had completed 379 of the 706 projects listed until March 28.

For the ten smart cities listed in the state, the total value of completed projects was Rs 11,564.9 crore, against the total project value of Rs 20,745 crore.
 

Rajasthan had the second-highest completion rate in terms of value at 48.7 per cent, whereas Delhi’s completion rate was 43.6 per cent. Assam and Punjab were the worst performers among the larger states with 5.4 and 5.8 per cent completion, respectively.
 

Of the 35 states/UTs for which data is available, 10 had a completion rate of less than 10 per cent. As many as 25 states and UTs performed lower than the national average of 28.3 per cent.
 

UP also performed better than the rest of the states in the value per completed project. The value per completed project of the state was Rs 30.5 crore, whereas the value of projects at various stages of completion was Rs 28.1 crore.
 

Three other states/UTs had completed projects of higher value than those that remained unfinished. In Dadra and Nagar Haveli, the value per completed project was Rs 43 crore, whereas the value per unfinished project was Rs 24.1 crore. This was also the case for Manipur and Telangana.
 

For the country, while Rs 16.8 crore worth of projects were completed, the value per unfinished project was Rs 38 crore.
 

A higher value per unfinished project indicates that the states have completed smaller projects first, but the larger ones, which are more prone to cost and time delays, remain to be completed.