📄 Abstract
India's Smart Cities Mission (SCM), launched in 2015, committed USD 15 billion of public investment to 100 cities while climate projections warned of compounding urban risks. A decade later, the question of whether smart city projects embed climate resilience remains largely unexamined in primary policy documents. This descriptive qualitative study applies content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005; Sandelowski, 2000) to 11 source documents: six city Smart City Proposals (Bengaluru, Dehradun, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi, Pune), two Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) performance audits, the Ministry's SCM Guidelines, a UN-Habitat partnership report on urban resilience, and IPCC Working Group II findings. A deductive codebook aligned with the IPCC AR6 Climate Resilient Development framework was combined with inductive codes emerging from the city proposals. Keyword frequency analysis revealed that four of the six proposals contained zero instances of the terms climate, resilience, adaptation, or mitigation; the remaining two used resilience in an economic rather than climatic sense. Six thematic findings are reported: (a) absence of climate vocabulary, (b) infrastructure-first framing, (c) technology substitution for adaptation, (d) flooding acknowledged without climate attribution, (e) audit findings of delay and misallocation, and (f) the disconnect between international frameworks and on-ground proposals. The study concludes that the SCM, as documented, functions as an infrastructure modernisation programme rather than a climate resilience instrument, and proposes four reforms for integrating climate resilience into the successor programme.
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📚 How to Cite:
Vedika Shrivastava , CLIMATE RESILIENCE IN SMART CITY PROJECTS: A DESCRIPTIVE QUALITATIVE STUDY , Volume 13 , Issue 6, June 2026, EPRA International Journal of Environmental Economics, Commerce and Educational Management(ECEM) , Pages: 344 - 348 , DOI: https://doi.org/10.36713/epra30749