Dhaka has never had a hardware problem. Automated signals went into 29 intersections and were never really switched on, because nobody had budgeted the people to run them, and the metro that opened in 2022 caps its own service for want of trained staff. What works here tends to be what needs nobody to act: a prepaid electricity meter that collects before it supplies, a district-metered water zone that loses under 5 per cent where it exists and over 40 per cent where it does not. And where a reading needs a decision, the city is rich in readings and short of the sentence saying what must follow one.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Dhaka, the earliest dating to 2002: 1 documented failure, 1 scaled back, 8 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is peer-reviewed (1 entry) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Dhaka is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
2002–2007: the instruments arrive first. Dhaka began measuring before it began deciding. Continuous air monitoring dates from 2002, and from 2007 Dhaka WASA started cutting its network into district metered areas. Both are still running, and both illustrate the same thing: an instrument tells you where you are, not what you are obliged to do about it.
2005–2018: the systems that need no operator. The two that worked best ask nothing of a person on a shift. Prepaid electricity meters, in the city since 2005, collect before they supply. A metered water zone is the same trick applied to a pipe. The limit shows up where the mechanism cannot reach: DPDC's own arrears are owed overwhelmingly by government agencies, which is precisely the customer a utility does not switch off. In 2018 the Rapid Pass card launched on two bus routes; it has since left the buses.
2012–2023: the signals nobody could run. The World Bank-funded CASE project put automated signals into 29 intersections and they were never really switched on. In the same period the Metropolitan Police moved traffic prosecution onto handheld devices and began publishing a daily table — and, unusually for this atlas, that table shows fines realised as well as charged, the number richer systems tend not to print.
2021–2026: measured, published, and then what. RAJUK moved construction permits online in the early 2020s, but the system is a login, not a public register. The two city corporations run a pre-monsoon larval survey whose ward-level index does send crews to named wards — the clearest case in the city of a reading with a consequence. And the second attempt at signals answers 2012 directly by staffing every junction, and is held up by procurement instead.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2002 to 2025. Pick a dot to read what it was.
No start date on record: Pre-Monsoon Aedes Larval Survey and Ward-Targeted Drives
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Dhaka's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
The question Dhaka poses more clearly than most cities in this atlas is what a measurement is for. Its air network publishes a daily index and no reading obliges anything inside the city; the one legal lever in the rules runs on an annual average and was first used on the neighbouring upazila rather than on Dhaka. Standing water is not instrumented at all — the response to a flooded street is a crew and a telephone number. Against that, the larval survey and the daily fines table show the city can attach a consequence to a number when it decides to. The gap is not sensing, and on this record it never was.
Where Dhaka appears in the atlas's own analysis.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Dhaka, Bangladesh.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/dhaka/ (last verified 2026-08-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.