India’s rapid development needs help, but are the consultants value for money or just cashing in on another big project? It is monsoon season in India. This means heavy rains and as the climate crisis accelerates it can also mean disasters like landslides and floods. It’s been no different in 2023. Indian cities, including the capital New Delhi, the financial centre Mumbai, and the tech centre Bangalore, among others, have been inundated and paralysed by the weather. Indian cities already face significant problems, from a lack of infrastructure and resources to broad inequities on how local governments with limited funds and even less capacity react to disparities and environmental threats. As part of this, the Indian government announced in 2015 a slew of policies that focused on urban development, rejuvenation and infrastructure. The Smart Cities Mission was one of these policies that aimed to embed 100 Indian cities with digital technologies and interventions, capable of collecting and analysing vast amounts of data for governance, planning, and, perhaps in the future, monetisation. The estimated value of these smart projects, across all cities, is a little over USD$22 billion. While the mission was to be completed in five years it has since been extended to 2024. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Smart Cities Mission, he promised bottom-up development, improved quality of life especially for the urban poor, and innovative uses of technology. While there was some excitement regarding the mission, there was also some trepidation given its similarities to previous urban policies and the scope for privatised development. The rains are a reminder that while cities grow, the way they are planned is rarely inclusive or sustainable. India’s urban population is exploding. By 2030 approximately 40 percent of India’s population will be urban meaning these issues will become more widespread and the need to fix them becomes urgent. One of the ways in which the government has addressed this is by calling in the consultants. These companies, represented by McKinsey and the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms (Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PwC and KPMG), started to work with Indian governments in the 1990s. Much of this was stipulated by international organisations and funding agencies like the UN and World Bank. This was seen as a way to both improve the efficiency of governments – which could learn from these private sector actors – and to ensure the efficacy of these large projects. At the time, governments across the world were increasingly depending on consultants for project advice and implementation not only as a way to speed up government projects, but also as a way to reduce the size of public institutions. The importance of fixing urban issues has grown in lockstep with liberalisation and globalisation since the 1990s. Cities in India have become ‘engines of growth’ with increased urban productivity leading to significant increases in the country’s GDP. According to a 2018 World Bank analysis, India’s economy was growing at an annual average of more than 7 percent since the early 2000s compared to 4.4 percent in the 1970s-80s. The smart cities project is part of a global trend of building smart cities and borrows from smart interventions introduced in other countries. Interestingly, the private sector, specifically technology firms and management consulting firms, have played a significant role in the conceptualisation, spread, and implementation of the smart city concept. The design of the policy itself was heavily influenced by consulting firms. One official who has been involved in the Smart Cities Mission since the planning stage told researchers that ‘smartness’ in the Indian context was defined by, and the mission was largely designed by, many of these firms. More than 50 firms, including consulting businesses and technology firms, were invited to present their views on what a smart city is and what the aims of a smart city policy should be. The Smart Cities Mission guidelines incorporated ideas from these presentations and built on these approaches. Subsequently, the guidelines actually required city governments to engage consultant’s services to plan their interventions and the financial distribution across smart city projects. It was thought that local authorities did not have the capacity or know-how when it comes to smart city development and therefore external expertise was necessary. As one management consultant told researchers: “Many times within government there might not be the skillset. It’s very technical. I am not saying that government officials don’t have or a government official might not have that skill but you need a group of people.