Smart Cities and Emergency Response in India: What Is Really in Place

All 100 Smart Cities under the Smart Cities Mission now have an operational Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC), and these centres worked as COVID war rooms during the pandemic (Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs, December 2024).

But a control room full of screens is not the same as a tested emergency plan. No official count of Smart Cities with fully working disaster-response plans has been published.

The Smart Cities Mission promised connected cities that could see a problem and respond in real time. Cameras, sensors and dashboards have certainly arrived. For residents the question is simpler: when there is a fire in your building or water in your street, does that technology get a fire engine, an ambulance or a warning to you any faster?

What the official data shows

As on 15 November 2024, the Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs reported that all 100 Smart Cities have operational ICCCs, with over 84,000 CCTV cameras, 1,884 emergency call boxes and 3,000 public address systems installed.

The Ministry describes ICCCs improving transport, water supply and waste management. How well they link fire, ambulance and hospitals is far less documented. The Ministry does not publish a city-wise score for emergency or disaster readiness, so an earlier tier-wise “audit” table and a “1 in 5” claim on this page have been withdrawn.

Where the Mission stands in 2026

The Smart Cities Mission formally closed on 31 March 2025, and the Centre has said there is no budgetary outlay for it after that date. In a Rajya Sabha reply in July 2025, as reported, the Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs gave the position as on 11 July 2025: 7,636 of 8,063 projects completed, worth ₹1,53,977 crore, with 427 projects worth ₹10,718 crore still ongoing. An analysis published in October 2026, citing ministry data, gives 7,790 of 8,064 projects completed by 31 March 2026. The two counts are from different dates and should not be added together.

For emergency response, the question now is who runs the command centres. The same analysis reports that the ministry advised states in June 2025 to repurpose the city companies that ran the Mission, and to draw up a roadmap for running the command centres. It gives two examples. Chandigarh wound up its smart city company in March 2025 and handed projects to line departments. Nagpur’s command centre, cameras and traffic systems are passing to the municipal corporation, which must now meet the running costs. The author’s warning is that a command centre without maintenance, security audits and a plan for the original vendor’s exit can become a wasted asset.

Neither the official reply nor the analysis measures how fast any city’s command centre gets a fire engine or an ambulance to a call, so the figures above show what was built, not how well it works in an emergency. In February 2026 the Union Cabinet approved a successor, the Urban Challenge Fund of ₹1 lakh crore for 2025-26 to 2030-31, which pays 25 per cent of project cost and expects at least half of the money to be raised through bonds, loans or private partnership.

• Ask your municipal corporation who now runs your city’s command centre, and who pays its electricity, staff and software bills.
• Ask whether the 112 emergency number, the fire brigade control room and the ambulance service are linked to it, and when that link was last tested in a drill.

What a city emergency response plan needs

• A command and control centre that connects police, fire, ambulance, hospitals and civic departments on one screen.
• Risk mapping that shows fire stations, hospitals, flood-prone streets and vulnerable buildings.
• Real-time public alerts through SMS, apps, sirens, public address systems and display boards.
• An Emergency Operations Centre staffed round the clock, with people from police, fire and health.
• An evacuation and relief plan with shelters identified in advance, and the transport and supplies to use them.
• Back-up power and communication, so the centre keeps working during a flood or blackout.

City examples

City-level claims that earlier appeared here, such as Surat’s response time falling from 22 to 11 minutes, Bhopal’s “₹150 crore” control centre going offline, and a ranked table of city response times, could not be verified from official sources and have been withdrawn. If your city publishes ICCC or fire service response data, use that.

Where cities often fall short

1. Command centres built mainly for traffic and civic services, with emergencies added later.
2. Fire and health services left at the edge of Smart City planning and budgets.
3. No single city-level body that plans for disasters across all departments.
4. Data that does not flow between departments in real time.
5. Little training for residents, so alerts do not always turn into action.

Why there is no international table here

Earlier “Smart City Emergency Integration (%)” scores and response times for India, Singapore, Japan, the USA and the UAE could not be traced to any published index and have been withdrawn.

The way forward

• Every ICCC should have a proper emergency module with fire, police, ambulance and hospital data on one dashboard.
• Each city should have a disaster management cell working with the district authority and the state SDMA.
• Cities should publish emergency response times from their ICCCs, so residents can see how they perform.
• A public alert app or SMS service should reach every resident in the local language.
• Cities should hold mock drills at least twice a year with residents, schools, hospitals and markets.

What you can do

• Find out whether your city has an ICCC, and whether your ward’s emergency call boxes and PA systems work.
• Sign up for your city’s or state’s official alert service, if there is one.
• Save 112 on every family phone, and know your nearest fire station and hospital.
• Ask your corporator: does our command centre connect to the fire brigade and ambulances, and when was the last city drill?

Smart cameras can count cars. A smart city should also get help to you faster, and that is the test worth asking your corporator about.

References

• PIB / MoHUA: Smart Cities Mission Achievements (18 December 2024)