Expert insights, best practices, and thought leadership on urban governance transformation
Between 2016 and 2022, India invested over ₹4,000 crores in building Integrated Command and Control Centers (ICCCs) across 100 Smart Cities. Today, more than 90% of these centers function as little more than expensive CCTV monitoring rooms. What went wrong? And more importantly, what can cities do to fix it?
When the Smart Cities Mission was launched in 2015, ICCCs were envisioned as nerve centers that would integrate city operations: traffic management, emergency response, utilities monitoring, citizen services, environmental sensors, and more. The promotional videos showed futuristic control rooms with wall-to-wall displays, real-time data streaming, and officers making intelligent decisions based on predictive analytics.
Fast forward to 2024. Visit any ICCC in India and you'll find: CCTV feeds on large screens, a few operators watching traffic, perhaps some basic dashboards showing static information, and a lot of expensive equipment gathering dust. Commissioners visit during inaugurations and then rarely return. Officers joke that ICCC stands for "Command Center that Commands Nothing."
The fundamental error was letting EPC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction) contractors build ICCCs. These are companies with expertise in hardware—networking, CCTVs, display walls, servers. They understand IT infrastructure, not urban governance. They've never managed a sanitation department, processed property tax assessments, or coordinated emergency response.
The result? ICCCs designed around what hardware vendors know how to deliver: video walls showing CCTV feeds, network operations centers, generic dashboards pulled from whatever software they could quickly integrate. When asked about operational workflows, they'd say "We'll integrate with your existing systems." But cities didn't have systems worth integrating.
Real Example:
A Tier-2 city spent ₹28 crores on an ICCC. The integrator installed 200 CCTVs, a 4×4 video wall, a sophisticated NOC, and dashboards showing traffic density. But sanitation workers still marked attendance on paper, property tax assessments were done manually, complaint tracking was via phone calls, and machinery allocation happened through WhatsApp messages. The ICCC became an expensive security monitoring room with no connection to actual municipal operations.
ICCCs were conceived as top-down command centers where senior officers would watch dashboards and give instructions. But there was no connection to the bottom—the field workers actually doing the work. Sanitation supervisors didn't have mobile apps to report collection status. Engineers couldn't update complaint resolution from the field. Revenue inspectors used manual registers unchanged since the 1990s.
Without field connectivity, ICCCs became information black holes. They could display data, but couldn't collect it in real-time. Everything required manual entry by data operators transcribing from paper reports—a process so slow that by the time information appeared on screens, it was already outdated and useless for decision-making.
The procurement mindset was: "We need to build an ICCC building, install equipment, and declare it operational." Success was measured in hardware deployed—number of CCTVs, size of video walls, server capacity—not operational outcomes. RFPs focused on technical specifications, not governance transformation.
A true ICCC should be measured by: 20% faster complaint resolution, 95% SLA compliance, real-time waste collection monitoring, 15% increase in revenue collection efficiency, zero unauthorized machinery usage, complete field workforce visibility. But these weren't even KPIs in most contracts.
Fortunately, it's not too late. Cities don't need to tear down existing ICCCs. They need to transform them from hardware rooms to operational intelligence platforms. Here's how:
The failure of most ICCCs wasn't inevitable. It was predictable—the natural result of hardware-first thinking, inadequate vendor expertise, and lack of operational depth. But cities that recognize these mistakes and take corrective action can still realize the original vision: intelligent command centers that genuinely improve urban governance and citizen services.
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