The Smart Cities Mission and its ICCCs: what was built, and what comes next

What was the Smart Cities Mission?

The Smart Cities Mission was a central programme to improve the quality of life in 100 Indian cities through infrastructure and technology projects. The Government of India launched it on 25 June 2015. MoHUA selected the 100 cities through four rounds of competition, from January 2016 to June 2018.

Each city followed two approaches. Area-based development improved one defined part of the city, chosen with citizen participation. Pan-city projects applied technology-driven solutions across the whole city. Each city set up a special purpose vehicle under the Companies Act, 2013, owned 50:50 by the state or union territory and the urban local body (ULB), to plan and deliver the projects.

The central government's allocated budget for the mission was about Rs 48,000 crore. MoHUA reported that 99.44% of the budgeted outlay had been released to the 100 cities by 31 March 2025, with states, ULBs and partnerships funding the rest of an investment of about Rs 1.64 lakh crore.

What was a Smart City ICCC meant to do?

A Smart City ICCC was meant to give each city one centre where departments see the same live picture of the city and coordinate their response. In a Lok Sabha reply on 10 August 2023, MoHUA described ICCCs as the 'brain and nervous system' for city operations, and named inter-departmental coordination as one of their main features.

The same reply lists the departments integrated with ICCCs: traffic police, health, water, solid waste management and irrigation. It calls integration with the police department one of the most important achieved in most cities, and says efforts were under way to link ICCCs with CCTNS, the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, MoHUA reports, ICCCs also served as city war rooms.

To help cities buy ICCCs, a Model ICCC RFP (request for proposal) was developed in 2016, and Model RFP 2.0 was released in 2021, according to CERT-In's cyber security guidelines for smart city infrastructure. What an ICCC connects, layer by layer, is covered in our note on what an ICCC integrates.

How many ICCCs are operational, according to MoHUA?

MoHUA reports that all 100 Smart Cities have operational ICCCs. It said so in a Lok Sabha reply on 10 August 2023, and again in a PIB note of 24 June 2025 that gives the position as of 31 March 2025.

'Operational' is MoHUA's word, and it does not say how many systems each centre integrates or how many departments work from it. The same note says traffic enforcement systems for red-light violations and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) were installed, and that intelligent traffic management systems (ITMS) are monitored through ICCCs. The figures in the table are MoHUA's, as published.

When did the Smart Cities Mission end?

The Smart Cities Mission ended on 31 March 2025. On 3 July 2024 MoHUA announced that the mission period had been extended to that date so cities could finish the remaining 10% of projects, without any money beyond the approved allocation. MoHUA's advisory of 10 June 2025 refers to the completion of the mission on 31 March 2025.

Not every project was finished by then. MoHUA reported that as of 9 May 2025, 7,555 of the 8,067 projects (94%) were complete, worth Rs 1,51,361 crore, and 512 projects worth Rs 13,043 crore were in advanced stages of implementation. Those remaining projects sit with the city SPVs and the states, which the June 2025 advisory asks to complete them on time.

What happens to SPVs and ICCCs now?

MoHUA's position is that both should keep running. Its Advisory No. 27, announced on 10 June 2025, says the Government of India is of the view that SPVs and ICCCs should continue to operate beyond the mission. It asks every SPV to finish ongoing mission projects and to prepare detailed operation and maintenance (O&M) plans for the assets the mission created.

For ICCCs, the advisory says they are to be used as city operating systems and state analytical hubs, with operational control preferably kept by the urban development departments. SPVs may earn service-linked revenue for managing ICCC functions. States are encouraged to integrate more city services into their ICCCs and to upgrade them on time. The advisory names five areas for SPVs' future work.

• Technology support: cyber hygiene, analytics, data systems and running ICCCs
• Project implementation: acting as implementing agency for central and state schemes, with a charge of 1.5% to 3% as per state norms
• Consulting support to ULBs and state departments
• Research and assessment, including acting as incubation hubs for urban technology start-ups
• Investment facilitation for city-level economic development

What comes after the Smart Cities Mission?

The main new central programme for cities is the Urban Challenge Fund (UCF). Announced in the Union Budget 2025-26, it was approved by the Union Cabinet with total central assistance of Rs 1 lakh crore, as reported by PIB on 14 February 2026. It runs from FY 2025-26 to FY 2030-31, with implementation extendable to FY 2033-34.

The UCF works differently from the Smart Cities Mission. Central assistance covers 25% of a project's cost, and at least 50% must be raised from the market, through municipal bonds, bank loans or public-private partnerships. Projects are chosen in challenge mode under three verticals: Cities as Growth Hubs, Creative Redevelopment of Cities, and Water and Sanitation.

Security is the other thread. MoHUA issued advisories on cyber security for smart city infrastructure and ICCCs (Advisories No. 22, 24 and 25), and CERT-In's guidelines for smart city infrastructure include a section on operational security for command and control centres. Those guidelines say ICCC logs should be forwarded to a central server and maintained as per CERT-In's directions of 28 April 2022.

What should a city check before upgrading or re-tendering its ICCC?

A city should first find out what it owns and what still works. The mission that paid for the ICCC has ended, and each contract, licence and piece of hardware has its own end date.

• When each O&M contract and software licence ends, and who holds it: the SPV, the ULB or the state
• An inventory of every integrated system, and whether each integration still works today
• Whether the city owns the data, the configurations, the interface documentation and the administrator passwords
• The age of cameras, servers, storage and the video wall, and which are near end of support
• A cyber security audit against MoHUA's ICCC advisories and CERT-In's directions
• Who funds operators on every shift once mission money has ended
• Which new services the city wants to integrate, as the June 2025 advisory encourages, and which departments' procedures must change to use them

How Ahuva approaches ICCC work

Ahuva has built command and control centres since 2015, when it delivered its first, for a major port project at Visakhapatnam. Its ICCC scope covers centre design, video walls, consoles and AV, and the integration of CCTV, GIS, IoT, SCADA and analytics, with incident management. It is currently delivering the integrated command and control centre for Project Sarthi for the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation, contracted via KELTRON.