By the mid-2010s, a few pioneering cities—like Pune, Surat, Bhubaneswar, and Ahmedabad—began experimenting with digitising core urban services like property tax, water connections, building plan approvals, and grievance redressal. These early efforts were encouraging, but they exposed several systemic challenges. Many municipal corporations adopted closed, proprietary software that offered limited flexibility, was costly to scale, and created dependency on specific vendors. Others struggled with fragmented systems—different departments using different platforms, making interoperability a major hurdle. In many cases, staff lacked training or digital literacy, leading to underutilisation of the systems. The result? Citizen experience remained inconsistent, and municipal performance was uneven.