When Ministry of Urban Development of the Government of India unveiled it plan to build 100 Smart cities (revised to 109) in 2015 with a budgetary support of 15 billion US$, it held the hopes of every citizen of this country high. The original plan was to go for urban renewal and retrofitting of existing mid-sized cities, and develop them as satellite towns which are filled with sustainable infrastructure, citizen friendly services and a cobweb of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure. But is longing for such rebuildings realistic? Or is it too big a dream for our Republic? Accounting for various challenges that implementing the Smart Cities Mission on its full throttle will require a multifarious analysis because there are few problems which are peculiar to India. Focusing narrowly on city-centric urban planning is a shortcoming of the present approach. This is because such smart cities are envisaged to serve a much more wider regional area and resortin...