India's cities and towns have been struggling with a rapid influx of people. Problems such as congestion, pollution and traffic accidents are on the rise across urban India. An April 2018 study by the Boston Consulting Group and commissioned by Uber (Unlocking Cities: The Impact of Ridesharing Across India, goo.gl/EhPLE1) pegs the economic loss due to traffic congestion in India's four biggest cities Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata at $22 billion annually. Towns and cities are India's engines of growth. It is essential to make them run efficiently. Focused efforts have enabled India to make great progress in basic infrastructure. Cognisant of the burgeoning needs of urban India, GoI has embarked on an ambitious mission to set up Smart Cities across the country, aimed at driving economic growth and improving the quality of life by harnessing technology. As part of this mission, 99 cities have been selected with expected investment of about 2 lakh crore. In its June 2018 document, National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence #AIFORALL NITI Aayog has identified smart cities and smart mobility as two of the five focus areas for AI intervention. Zero-emission vehicles have been another priority area.The advent of Industry 4.0 has made it possible to tackle existing infrastructural deficiencies from a different lens. This has provided the opportunity of solving these problems exponentially, rather than in a linear fashion. Big Data and advanced data analytics have the potential of transforming India from a data-rich country to a data-intelligent economy. AI, powered by unlimited access to computing power and a huge fall in the cost of storing data, has the potential to address the challenges of connectivity, smarter and safe modes of transportation, and management of traffic and congestion problems. Leveraging transforming technologies like AI, Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain needs a framework that is an aggregation of three distinct yet inter-related components economic opportunity, social and inclusive growth, and positioning India as the technology garage of the world. Ensuring active involvement of citizens in shaping the decision-making and implementation is one of the most critical components of this formula. A more bottom-up, rather than top-down, approach with them as changemakers is needed. NITI Aayog recently launched MoveHack, a global mobility hackathon inviting solutions, prototypes and ideas to address challenges facedby India in mobility and transportation.