Many more minds

An initiative to do something about our cities that could possibly work.

Indian cities have a number of problems: poor infrastructure, rickety service-delivery mechanisms, corruption, red-tapism "" the list goes on.

But exacerbating all these is the multiplicity of supervisory authorities and poor coordination between them, leading to overlap of jurisdictions and difficulties in pinning blame on any one body for a deficiency or wrong-doing.

With cities contributing as much as 60 per cent of the nation's GDP and housing 27.8 per cent of its population (2001 census), the need to develop our cities cannot be over-emphasised if we are to harness their growth potential.

This is where the Mega Cities Forum, being midwifed by the United States Agency (USAID) and International City and Country Manager's Association (ICCMA), will come in.

A meeting of commissioners/deputy commissioners of seven Indian "mega" cities (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai, with a population in excess of 10 million) was held in Kolkata on September 22 to discuss the creation of the forum.

Explaining the role of the proposed body, Alapan Bandopadhyay, municipal commissioner of Kolkata, says "The forum will be a platform to devise strategies to deal with the common challenges confronting these cities, to share best practices, to discuss policy issues, etcetera."

A number of countries have such an umbrella body of urban bodies "" the League of Cities in the United States of America, South African Cities Network, China Association of Mayors. At the international level, there are some like The Cities Alliance and World Federation of United Cities.

In India, the first initiative to set up such a not-for-profit, non-political forum was taken in October 2005 with a meeting of the executive heads of the urban bodies of these seven cities.

Nothing of note came of that, primarily because the commissioners of Mumbai and Kolkata could not be present, and a second meeting was held in Kolkata on September 22.

While there were absentees this time round too, Nabarun Bhattacharya, programme manager, USAID, says "The participants agreed on the need for the forum and agreed in-principle to support its formation."

The next meeting is scheduled three months later. USAID has already prepared a base paper on the forum, and is now in the process of drawing up its basic framework and memorandum of association. Funding for the secretariat and staff of the forum will come from the members themselves.

But while the Mega Cities Forum is still to take shape, USAID has been more successful with the City Managers' Association (CMA), a similar forum of urban sector professionals and executives at the level of the states.

The first of the CMAs in India was formed in Gujarat in 1997, and today 11 Indian states have them, sharing best practices and the like among peer groups, while drawing up suggestion plans for urban renewal.

As they say, two heads are always better than one, and many heads better than two.