India’s digital leap needs a fourth pillar: Real-time civic coordination

India’s smart city journey has achieved remarkable progress in building digital visibility into urban life. Over the past decade, we have created a network of command-and-control centres, data platforms, and sensor-based systems that have given cities new “eyes”—the ability to see what is happening across hundreds of urban touch points. They help with situational awareness and aid cities to monitor traffic, sanitation, utilities, and public safety in real time.

But as India transitions into its next phase of digital maturity, it begs the question: is visibility enough? The answer is no. For responsive governance and a seamless, inclusive, and safe citizen experience, India needs multiple civic systems to act together, dynamically, and in real time.

India’s next civic evolution

The first generation of smart city investments helped us collect data. The next generation must help us use it intelligently, collaboratively, and equitably. This shift from command to coordination represents a deeper evolution in how India governs, manages, and serves its citizens.

The concept of a ‘coordination stack’ is central to this transformation. It envisions a shared, interoperable digital framework that allows multiple agencies—from traffic police to utilities to disaster management—to work together through common data layers, protocols, and workflows. Instead of isolated responses, cities would operate as connected ecosystems, where decisions in one domain immediately inform and optimise another. This stack would empower decision support through real-time situation awareness, as the complexity of information processing and analysis would be highly efficient in the interconnected system of systems.

Globally, cities such as Singapore, Seoul, and Helsinki have started experimenting with such multi-agency coordination models. However, India is uniquely positioned to leapfrog this evolution. Our diversity, scale, and experience in building public digital infrastructure make us the ideal testbed to design a coordination framework that is both inclusive and scalable, and one that others could eventually adopt.

The India Stack way

We already have the foundational experience. The India Stack, which combines digital identity, digital payments, and data-sharing frameworks, has redefined how public and private systems can collaborate at scale. It has given us models of interoperability that go far beyond technology. They represent a governance philosophy built on openness, inclusion, and trust.

India’s telecom infrastructure is now among the most advanced in the world, supported by one of the largest subscriber bases and some of the fastest 4G/5G rollouts globally. Affordable data rates have transformed access at scale, enabling digital participation across every social and economic segment. Massive investments in fibre networks through initiatives such as BharatNet and near-ubiquitous mobile coverage have enabled hundreds of millions of citizens and

businesses to adopt digital services across payments, governance, education, and healthcare, making telecom the backbone of India’s digital transformation journey.

Just as Aadhaar revolutionised access to welfare, and UPI reimagined the scope and reach of digital finance, the next frontier lies in extending this logic of integration to civic infrastructure. A “coordination stack” would connect not people and payments, but systems and decisions, empowering administrators to act with speed, precision, and accountability.

From dashboards to decisions

In most cities today, Integrated Command and Control Centres (ICCCs) collect and display data from thousands of sensors and systems, but often stop at visibility. While dashboards help officials monitor what’s happening, they don’t always enable clarity on what should happen next, or who should do it. That’s where a coordination stack becomes essential, as it acts as a digital liaison between awareness and action, transforming alerts into structured workflows, and enabling multiple agencies to respond as a cohesive intelligent unit.

This isn’t futuristic; it’s already emerging in parts of India. In Lucknow, AI-powered cameras detect anomalies and auto-alert police units in real time. In Pimpri-Chinchwad, citizen reports are digitally routed to enforcement teams, reducing response time. These use cases reflect a larger shift underway, from monitoring to orchestration. The challenge ahead is architectural: building shared standards and governance frameworks that allow such coordination layers to operate seamlessly across departments and cities.

The next leap in civic innovation

If India succeeds in building a coordination stack for governance, the impact will extend far beyond its borders. Just as Aadhaar redefined identity globally, a framework for real-time civic coordination could become a blueprint for responsive urban governance worldwide. India’s diversity, scale, and institutional depth make it the ideal ground for such innovation. The growing presence of global delivery and capability centres (GDCs and GCCs) in India strengthens its advantage by acting as innovation engines that develop and scale AI, cloud, and data-driven solutions, providing the digital backbone to operationalise complex systems coordination.

At its heart, this is not about technology alone but about building more human-centric and empathetic cities. India’s success in orchestrating such coordination will not just transform how our cities function but will set a global benchmark for how emerging nations can combine purpose, scale, and innovation to build the cities of tomorrow.

(The author is the chief operating officer at NEC Corporation India and head of Global Smart City Centre of Excellence at NEC Corporation. Views are personal.)