Determinants of Smart Digital Infrastructure Diffusion for Urban Public Services

1.1. India’s Digital Journey

Several factors motivated India’s digital drive recently. Post 2015 India’s technology and scientific innovation got linked to sustainable development objectives (Surana et al., 2020), government’s self-reliant India policy triggered local innovation and entrepreneurship (Goyal & Garg, 2021), Covid19 amplified reliance digital platform’s capability and availability impacting impacted citizen’ life and livelihood (Lai & Widmar, 2021). Saxena (2018) cited anti-corruption and transparency in service delivery motivates government driven innovation, but Kumar and Kumara (2018) pointed out that motivations vary on maturity level, socio-economic strata, urban, semi-urban and rural demography, education and computer mobile penetration. On the other hand, India’s flagship IT industry of 191 B US $ contributes to 8% of India’s GDP employing nearly 5 million knowledge workers (Nasscom, 2020). However, 70-80% of the IT sector is focussed on international business (Statista, 2020), which reoriented to domestic business due to global geo-political factors. Domestic digitization increased lately with private and public sectors adopting technology for better quality, competitiveness and efficiency, rapid technology innovations whereas Government pushed for cost effective, high quality and transparent digital delivery of citizen services. This resulted domestic digital industry growing over next 5 years, where Research and Markets (2020) predicted nearly 75% growth of Indian digital industry advancing to a 700 billion US$ market size.