West Bengal turned down the national Smart Cities Mission outright in 2016, so nothing here carries that label or its funding — what Kolkata has instead is older and more scattered. India's oldest metro network just gained a CBTC-signalled corridor under the Hooghly River, still waiting on the paperwork to actually run automatically. The private utility CESC kept the lights on through the country's worst blackout in 2012 with a decades-old islanding scheme, then let its 2015 smart-meter pilot stall at 'strategic locations' rather than scale. Kolkata Police's camera network keeps growing under a women's-safety justification that the city's own crime statistics undercut. And a pollution-monitoring network that has run for years keeps confirming, faithfully, that Kolkata breathes the second-worst air of any Indian metro — without the power to do anything automatic about it.
Three entries that show what Kolkata is actually doing.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.