Indian cities clearly should be managed better. Mega-cities like Mumbai may blame the sheer size of population and migration, but India’s small towns are no better managed. If anything, small towns in the Gangetic plains are even worse managed than the big metropolitan cities. We cannot even blame poverty. There are other countries — like Vietnam — which are both very poor and very densely populated but do not suffer from the squalor that one associates with urban India. In short, there are no excuses for poor urban governance.
It has long been argued that the solution lies in decentralisation. Issues like waste management and water supply are local issues and need to be resolved locally. Fair enough. The newly built city of Gurgaon is expected to have an elected municipal government by the end of the year. In theory, this will allow municipal issues to be tackled locally rather than in faraway Chandigarh, the state capital. As a resident of the town, I should be jumping with joy but, like most others, I am ambivalent. The reason is that local municipal government has not been a great success anywhere in India. What is the problem?
The historical background
In pre-colonial times, city government was handled by the local ruler or Mughal governor. This was an ad hoc system that the British attempted to modernise and institutionalise. In 1882, Lord Ripon created laws covering the establishment of local bodies, their powers and financial arrangements. This led to the evolution of functioning municipal bodies in at least some towns. Unlike later, local bodies attracted leading citizens and politicians. Calcutta Municipal Corporation, for instance, had well-known people like Subhash Bose as chief executive officer and later as mayor.
When India became Independent, it was envisaged that the government would have a decentralised structure with three tiers. In practice, however, the political dominance of a single party combined with socialist planning led to a very centralised power structure. Even when power did devolve to the states, it seldom percolated to the local bodies. In fact, state governments — usually dominated by rural politicians — saw municipal bodies as a threat and actively limited them. An attempt was made to force decentralisation in 1992 through the 74th amendment to the Constitution. Two decades later, municipal bodies remain very weak — their finances are poor and their powers unclear. Not surprisingly, citizens are usually apathetic to local body elections.
RWA democracy
Apathy towards local government does not mean that citizens do not care about local issues. Quite to the contrary, they actively participate in groups like Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) created under legal provisions such as the Apartment Ownership Act (most states have their own version). Neighbourhood RWAs have long existed in different forms in Delhi’s “colonies” or in the apartment blocks of Mumbai and Kolkata. They tended to limit themselves to micro-issues related to building maintenance. However, they are becoming increasingly vocal platforms because of the failure of the wider system.
The new-style RWAs are most active in new townships like Gurgaon that have mushroomed in the last decade. Typically, there is no pre-exiting elected body in these areas and the RWAs are the only form of local representation. However, both urban infrastructure and RWAs are organised according to “colonies”. Urban governance, therefore, is splintering up into a series of gated communities. This is even true of the poor who live in “urban villages” that also organise themselves internally. There is no direct link between this inward-looking arrangement and the governance of the overall city.
As India experiences rapid urban growth, this phenomenon will become even more widespread. Note that many of the new RWAs represent very large areas and tens of thousands of residents. Increasingly, RWAs are taking on powerful political interests and real estate developers. However, all this is happening through agitation rather than through the governance system.
Unifying parallel systems
Interestingly, RWAs represent a form of citizen participation that involves the middle class that has been usually apathetic to mainstream politics for many decades. The political class has begun to take note of this change. A few years ago, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit introduced a scheme called “Bhagidari” to tap into the energies of the RWA movement to help solve local issues.
Unfortunately, the RWA-based “democracy” is far from perfect. There is a great deal of internal politics and sometimes we have parallel RWAs representing the same area. Very often, they look at issues from the narrow view of their community rather than that of the wider urban fabric. The needs of the poor are frequently ignored as they are not property owners and consequently not RWA members. However, the biggest problem is that the RWA system does not fit easily into the constitutionally mandated system of wards and local bodies. This is why the Bhagidari experiment has yielded mixed results. In effect, we have two parallel legal frameworks — one for the municipal corporation and one for the RWA. In Delhi, this is further complicated by the fact that both state and Central governments are actively involved in municipal affairs.
The first step towards better municipal governance would be to synchronise the two systems so that local democracy is unified. One way could be that RWA representatives are made part of the municipal council. This may not be straightforward. Local body elections are based on the principle of “one vote per person”, whereas RWAs are based on real estate ownership. Nonetheless, we need to find a way in which all interests are reasonably represented within a unified framework. If not, we will continue with the current system of splintered democracy.
The author is President, Sustainable Planet Institute and Sr Fellow, WWF
