Performance assessment of governance in Indian smart city development

India is set to develop a hundred smart cities under Smart Cities Mission (SCM). New Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) established at the city level are developing these cities. Cities around the globe do not use this system for city development yet. SCM was launched in 2015, and these companies are working in some of these cities since 2016. This paper is an attempt to investigate the traditional system and SPV system with global best practices. The method for investigation includes developing a framework with the governance principles (defined by the United Nations Development Programme) and measurement parameters. By this framework, the performance of these governance systems can be measured/ranked; analysing these results give the nodal points where one system is better than the other and highlighting features; those can be incorporated to develop an alternative comprehensive system. The new service delivery mechanism (SPV) is still adapting and competing with the traditional system. There have been some positives as well as some criticism for SPVs in comparison to the traditional system. The data for analysis is mostly from secondary sources and structured official interviews. The cases selected for the analysis are cities from different states of India and some leading global cities. Smart cities development is still going on. As the analysis findings suggest, it needs a more efficient and converged implementation mechanism. The analysis framework is solely developed for this paper. The paper compares five of the Indian traditional city development process, SCM implementation strategy and leading city development processes around the world.