New 'Smart City' hatches solutions to urban chaos

Planners for new state capital envision drones, artificial intelligence to keep order and head off growth of slums

The government planners now dreaming up India’s first “smart city” realise they have a problem. To solve it they are planning to dispatch a fleet of drones, bury the power grid and link a biometric database to every square foot of land here in India’s newest state capital.

The problem is that none of India’s modern-day planned cities have lived up to their hype. Instead, they have succumbed to slums, crowding and chaos.

Amaravati was named the new capital of Andhra Pradesh after the Telangana region broke away as a new state in 2014. Since then, $1 billion in loan pledges from