When Covid-19 hit, Jabalpur’s Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC), like those in many of India’s 100 Smart Cities, became the city’s operational lifeline. Repurposed as the District Covid Command Centre, it tracked cases in real time, coordinated between departments and handled citizen distress calls. During the vaccination drive, the same digital backbone supported rollout efforts.
<figure class="art
The ICCC also ran Jabalpur’s Intelligent Traffic Management System (ITMS), detecting red-light violations and other traffic offences through cameras installed under a joint Madhya Pradesh government project covering Bhopal, Gwalior, Jabalpur and Ujjain.
Madhya Pradesh bans overseas trips for officials to cut costs
Sixteen months after the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) officially ended in March 2025 with the cessation of central funding, that digital backbone is under severe strain. Jabalpur’s grievance redressal platform suffers frequent server issues. Its ITMS has remained shut for over a year because of funding shortages. A temporary state grant has kept some operations alive but officials say funds are likely to run out by September. Technical staff who maintained 46,000 smart streetlights and other digital systems have been let go.
Nearly 1,600 km away, Shivamogga in Karnataka faces a similar challenge. Its ICCC was designed as the city’s digital nerve centre, integrating traffic management, GPS-based solid waste monitoring, RFID tracking of garbage vehicles, surveillance at waste collection points, smart water meters, drainage alerts, parking systems, LED streetlights, police kiosks and smart classrooms.
Today, only the traffic management component remains operational.
These cities reflect a broader trend. An HT review based on interviews with officials from more than 10 Smart Cities across multiple states found that just over a year after the Centre wound up the 10-year mission, the future of ICCCs—arguably its biggest technological legacy—is increasingly uncertain.
What are ICCCs
Built with part of the Centre’s ₹48,000 crore investment across 100 cities, ICCCs were conceived as integrated command rooms linking cameras, sensors and IoT devices on a single dashboard for traffic management, flood monitoring, waste management, grievance redressal and emergency response.
But keeping these systems running is proving expensive.
“It is estimated that simply operating the command centre costs nearly ₹10 lakh every month, or about ₹1.5 crore annually. It risks becoming a white elephant. Only the traffic challaning system is functioning while the other components are gradually dying,” said a municipal official overseeing Shivamogga’s ICCC.
In Jabalpur, “servers, firewalls, network routers and video walls—none of them have maintenance contracts anymore,” said Balendra Shukla, project officer at Jabalpur Smart City. The five-year contract with the master system integrator expired in August 2024 and no dedicated funds exist for software upgrades, licence renewals, camera maintenance or annual service contracts.
“We don’t even have money for housekeeping or guards,” he said.
In Dehradun, surveillance cameras have generated nearly ₹40 crore worth of traffic challans, but only around ₹11 crore has been recovered, according to an official. The city now requires ₹16-17 crore annually simply to maintain ICCC operations.
“Most of the hardware was procured in 2019 and will become obsolete within seven years. Without dedicated funding for software licences and hardware replacement, the entire system—which hosts data for multiple departments and supports the Uniform Civil Code call centre—is at risk of shutting down,” the official said.
Officials in Shivamogga said their automated traffic enforcement system has generated ₹45-50 crore in penalties, but none of that revenue is shared with the agency maintaining the infrastructure.
Also Read |Chandigarh:Court rejects MC accountant’s anticipatory bail plea in Smart City funds case
The financial strain has also triggered an exodus of skilled personnel. “Nearly 25 technically qualified employees who had worked on the project from the beginning were let go. Municipal staff do not have the expertise to manage disruptions,” said an official associated with the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar Smart City project. He added that delayed electricity payments had once led to power being disconnected from the city’s surveillance and traffic camera network.
Where it’s working and how
Rajkot, Vadodara, Bhopal, Ujjain and Chennai have evolved different models to sustain their digital infrastructure.
Also Read:Bank, Bhopal management college officials booked for siphoning off scholarships
Rajkot is expanding its ICCC rather than scaling it back. “We are installing additional cameras with analytics to improve monitoring of enforcement, mobility and municipal services,” said Rajkot Smart City CEO Chetan Nandani. The city is also consolidating servers into a central data facility to strengthen cybersecurity while adding a centralised streetlight monitoring system.
Vadodara expects to remain financially self-sustaining until at least 2029 through intelligent pole partnerships, vendor penalties and traffic enforcement revenue.
Bhopal has relied on monetising its 342-acre land bank to finance operations after central grants ended, although officials acknowledge that staffing has been reduced significantly.
In Chennai, the ICCC has been absorbed into mainstream municipal administration and now functions as a core disaster management and city monitoring centre rather than a standalone Smart City asset.
Centre’s role limited
The Union ministry of housing and urban affairs (MoHUA) did not respond to queries on the operational status of ICCCs across the 100 Smart Cities. A ministry official said the Centre knows all cities remain functional “at some level” but lacks consolidated data to assess the extent of operations.
The official said that no Smart City has achieved financial self-sufficiency because recurring expenditure on electricity, data storage, software and hardware replacement remains substantial.
According to the official, the Centre’s role is currently limited to issuing advisories encouraging states to share revenue generated through smart infrastructure and conducting workshops..
For many cities, the challenge is no longer building digital infrastructure—it is finding a way to keep it alive.
