16 Watering India’s smart cities Cat Button Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, UK Water is often absent from discourse on smart places. India’s smart city drive detracts from the need for basic infrastructure, even whilst setting it as a priority in policy. The very act of framing it as ‘smart’ overshadows service provision with headline-grabbing projects that are aimed at wealthy residents and leave those without access to basic infrastructure further behind. This chapter puts water at the centre of discussions of smart places in India by considering the situation in Mumbai in the context of India’s smart cities agenda. Rainwater harvesting could become a smart technology to provide more water, but these need to be functioning and maintained systems and not ‘eyewash’ to tick a box. This chapter calls for water-centric urban planning to create smart and just places. Key Words: Water; India; infrastructure; maintenance; governance 1. India’s Smart City Agenda India’s cities have the potential to be world-class. Smart places are central to the Government of India’s imagination of modern India, as indicated by the drive to create one hundred smart cities in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Smart Cities Mission in 2014 as a flagship programme in his first term of office that would shape the future of 100 cities (Das, 2020). This plan ostensibly works towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), specifically SDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities, which is in turn beginning to become synonymous with smart cities (Kaika, 2017). The documentation for the initiative puts basic infrastructure front and centre in the rationale (Ministry of Urban Development, 2015; Chakrabarty, 2019) but framing them as smart issues has at the same time directed attention elsewhere. Kaika (2017) says that smart cities might change the aims, but the how also needs addressing to create the radical change to our cities that we need. India’s Smart Cities Mission attempts to use the ideals of various smart city narratives to address the challenges of urbanization (Ministry of Urban Development, 2015). In doing so they are continuing trends of privatisation and market-led urbanisation that focusses on small affluent urban areas (Kaika, 2017; Joshi 2016). As Das (2020) points out, the aims of the Smart Cities Missions were laudable, a focus on the means took precedence over the outcomes, leading to market driven initiatives that favour the elite. The smart cities programme is driven from the centre and as such is also disempowering local governments (Tandon, 2020; Joshi, 2016, Jadhav, 2019). This leads to