Reducing Disaster Risks in Indian Smart Cities: A Five-Stage Resilience Maturity Model (RMM) Approach

Abstract

Smart Cities Mission is one of the flagship programmes of the Government of India launched in 2015 with an aim to develop a total of hundred Smart Cities in different states of India. The primary objective of this programme is the urban redevelopment and retrofitting to make existing cities smart, sustainable, and citizen-friendly which will ultimately lead to economic growth and improvement in the quality of life. The Smart City Mission, however, lacks to incorporate resilience as one of its objectives. India is vulnerable to disasters of all types, ranging from earthquakes, floods, droughts to terrorist attacks. The risk of disaster is compounded in an urban area due to densely populated areas, lack of planned development, stress on existing infrastructure, socio-economic imbalance including others. The focus of this study is to develop a holistic resilience maturity model for a smart city in India that can be used to incorporate resilience in planning, development through a stage-wise maturity. This paper used three Indian Smart Cities—Chennai, Surat, and Pune, all of which are a part of the Rockefeller 100 resilient cities, as the basis of the study. A detailed analysis of the proposals of these three cities was carried out and based on the same a resilience maturity model was developed. Though Indian cities are studied, the maturity model can be applicable to other developing countries having similar smart cities.