| Abstract |
This chapter focuses on the role of management consultants in designing India's smart cities. It discusses how private sector involvement is an integral part of India's Smart Cities Mission, the policy aimed at transforming 100 cities into smart cities. The chapter contextualizes this discussion using policy mobilities literature, demonstrating how smart city characteristics make it amenable to mobilization and to the dependence on a technocracy. The chapter discusses the role of India's federal government in building what is known as a consultocracy, how this consultocracy abbreviates policymaking processes and presents political decisions as technical ones, and how the dependence on expertise helps to entrench the role of the consultant and expand their networked knowledge. Discussing the implications of these trends on urban democracy, this chapter attempts to start plugging an important gap in policy research in India where the role of the private sector in policymaking remains nebulous. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021. All rights reserved. |
