For the first time in the country, a saturation model of implementing digital services in urban landscape shall be adopted with digital services, while preserving existing investments through a choice-based model. The focus is on the collectives (States and UTs) to enable combined finances and resources, leveraging economies of scale, and enabling standardization and best practices to be adopted.
This initiative is scaling up in all cities and towns by providing a shared digital infrastructure so that citizens living in different parts of the country can have a similar set of urban delivery services. Under NUDM, the digital assets have been developed as digital Public Goods that are being made accessible under the terms of an Open-Source License. This will enable all cities across the country to offer a set of digital services, which are available on GitHub and OpenForge, that may be adopted by the community.

As of this date, this initiative is offering UPYOG with 10 applications that include a bouquet of services ranging from citizen services to business services to internal functional services. The source code for the platform is available on GitHub on open license terms. 30+ MOUs were signed with State/UTs to conduct diagnostic assessments to identify e-governance service delivery maturity gaps and develop a roadmap for NUDM implementation.
UMEED (Urban Monitoring for Efficient and Effective Decision-making), a real-time customizable dashboard, is being offered empowering stakeholders with valuable insights into the services. Currently, 2000+ cities have been enabled to push live data on the UMEED.
Additionally, it is the first mission to develop and publish six Standards—Guidelines and Specifications—across urban e-governance domains to promote data usage, data-driven governance, and to enable interoperability of data, processes, and systems in Urban Local Bodies in a secure manner.

Central Government organizations such as MoHUA and NIUA are in the lead. Ministry of Electronics and IT provides the relevant digital technologies and standards. Key integrations are done with assistance from National Informatics Centre and PayGov amongst others.
Key civil society participant in the mission is eGovernments (eGov) Foundation, a non-profit organization, which has provided the base source code.
NUDM is also collaborating with UNICEF, World Bank, and other multilateral bodies.

All the States and UTs are integral part of this initiative. Through them, it is aimed to cover every ULB, approximating at 4800+ today and anticipated to increase in the near future. Parastatals of relevant services such as Town Planning, Water and Wastewater departments are being impacted.
More than 50 private firms have been empanelled to provide services on this software, and over 200 people have received in-depth training, ensuring a talent pool for customisation and development services.

This initiative has empowered 3000+ cities and 300 million+ individuals by improving digital access. It has also mobilized more than 6 million Urban Corporation workforce to develop a productive system that has streamlined processes, minimized paperwork, reduced municipal service delivery time, and enhanced governance. NUDM has enabled 2000+ cities to push live data on the National Urban Real-Time Dashboard. In fact, Municipal revenues, including tax collection, non-tax collection, and internal efficiency savings, are expected to rise by 10%, 10%–15%, and 5%, respectively.
Also, NUDM has partnered with UNICEF to implement a Fecal Sludge Management module in 4 States, aimed to have significant improvement in sanitation measures across these.

The primary challenge has been the availability of digital urban services across all towns and cities in the country.
This is manifested in governance issues like digital divide between urban cities and towns; limited and inequitable access to online citizen service delivery; inefficiency, low productivity of ULBs and below-par revenue collection; fragmented applications; lack of funds and technical expertise; obsolete technology and limited data integration for decision-making; lack of ‘standards-based’ approach and interoperability issues.
NUDM responded to such issues by providing a choice-based, cost-saving, saturation model of availability of digital services for all urban citizens, businesses and municipal personnel.

Integration of efforts and experience of the government, industry, academia, and civil society to strengthen India's cities and towns’ capacity to use digital technology to address critical urban challenges at speed and scale has led to the success of this initiative.
Additionally, support from Empanelled Implementation Partners and fellows of Young Professionals, has enabled States and Cities to offer a set of digital services to citizens by speedy procurement and implementation of NUDM.
Lastly, the guidance and motivation provided by the leaders of this mission have accelerated the digital journey in all kinds of cities and towns. Further,our leaders have nudged States and Cities from time to time to go digital first.

Yes, this innovation has been replicated in all different sorts of cities and towns in India by providing a common digital infrastructure to ensure that residents residing in diverse regions of the country have access to an equivalent range of urban delivery services. In addition to this, the digital assets have been developed as digital Public Goods, and they are being made available to the public under the conditions of an Open-Source Licence. Because of this, every city in the country is able to provide a collection of digital services, which can be found on GitHub and OpenForge. Additionally, these digital services have the potential to be replicated by other cities and countries.

During this initiative, it is noted that various urban service departments are still working in silos, and bringing these departments to the table needs a lot of coordination & collaboration. Also, due to lack of technical & domain expertise in the urban workforce for implementing NUDM in their States & Cities, significant and continuous capacity-building is required.
Further, lack of digital literacy among municipal employees becomes a hindrance to the implementation of NUDM. Hence, it becomes crucial to make them understand the benefits of providing digital urban service delivery.
This mission has grown in the States & cities; hence, the requirement of funds and human resources to implement this mission has grown proportionally as well.

Periodically, NUDM also makes an effort to scale broadly by adding new applications, such as Asset Management and Faecal Sludge Management, as well as providing new features, such as an electronic identification document cloud (DigiLocker), an online payment gateway, and geo-tagging. In line with this, pre-existing software and services are undergoing an upgrade and are being standardized on a continuous basis. This voyage of modernization, which entails the addition of new features and the enhancement of existing ones, is an ongoing process.
Also, it is the first mission to have a “contribution back” model wherein states and cities contribute back the newly developed software assets to be made available to others.