Focussing on the urban mobility aspects of one Smart City Challenge, submitted by New Town, Kolkata, we assess how democratically transformative was the collective process of imagining smart cities in India. Our results indicate that while considerable efforts were made to engage with citizens in the making of the imaginary, the process remained highly uneven and technology-centric, shaped by ‘globalised’ aspirations of urban smartness and by the upper and middle classes, leaving behind the voices and needs of poor and marginalised citizens of Kolkata.