The Institute for Management Development, in collaboration with Singapore University for Technology and Design (SUTD), has released the 2020 Smart City Index, with key findings on how technology is playing a role in the COVID-19 era in a way that is likely to remain. Four Indian cities, New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, witnessed a significant drop in their rankings in the global listing of smart cities that was topped by Singapore.

In the Smart City Index 2020, Hyderabad was placed at the 85th position (67th in 2019), New Delhi at 86th rank (68th in 2019), Mumbai was at 93rd place (78th in 2019), and Bengaluru at 95th (79th in 2019). The report said that the cities in India suffer significant drops this year due to the detrimental effect of the pandemic, where technological advancement was not up to date.

The report said Indian cities have suffered more from the pandemic because they were not prepared. The second edition of the SCI ranked 109 cities worldwide by capturing perceptions of randomly chosen 120 residents in each city. Hundreds of citizens from 109 cities were surveyed in April and May 2020 and asked questions on the technological provisions of their city across five key areas: health and safety, mobility, activities, opportunities and governance.  From 15 indicators that the respondents perceive as the priority areas for their city, all four cities highlighted air pollution as one of the key areas that they felt their city needed to prioritise on.

“It is of course too early to draw the lessons from COVID. However, it is clear that we are at a critical juncture, where the sanitary crisis is still very much with us, while the economic and social crisis that it will entail has hardly started,” said Bruno Lanvin, President of the IMD Smart City Observatory.

“We cannot ignore the impact of COVID,” said IMD’s Professor Arturo Bris, who led the work of the ranking as the Director of the World Competitiveness Center at the Swiss management institute which is behind it. Those with better technology manage the pandemic better. Smart cities are not the solution, but technology helps, he explained.

“Smart cities closer to the top of the rankings seem to deal with unexpected challenges of the devastating pandemic with a better outcome,” remarked Professor Heng Chee Chan, chairperson of the Lee Kuan Yew Centre for Innovative Cities at SUTD

The 2020 Smart City Index (SCI) was topped by Singapore, followed by Helsinki and Zurich in the second and the third place respectively. Others in the top 10 list include Auckland (4th), Oslo (5th), Copenhagen (6th), Geneva (7th), Taipei City (8th), Amsterdam (9th), and New York at the 10th place.