It is now proven beyond doubt that India needs a new imagination of how to govern her cities. The last decade finally saw the emergence of the city as a political agenda and a significant increase in investments in urban infrastructure and services. But the narrowly focused, mission- and scheme-led development of our cities across both the Union and state governments is not delivering the desired results.
We are faced with worsening quality of life and inequity on our streets and in our neighbourhoods despite larger budgetary outlays by governments and increasing prosperity of city dwellers. Urban India’s challenge is primarily of systems and institutions, rather than of infrastructure and services. The latter is a consequence of well-designed and well-functioning systems and institutions. We need, therefore, to invest in robust “city-systems” to break out of the present status quo in our cities.
City-systems are a unique combination of three interlinked but distinct dimensions of democratic governance in cities. First, participatory governance institutions in neighbourhoods which foreground voice and agency of citizens through transparency and citizen participation. Examples include ward committees and area sabhas, or even slum dweller associations in Odisha or the older Kudumbashree groups in Kerala.
Participatory governance activates a virtuous cycle of engagement between citizens and governments leading to better prioritization, resource allocation and project execution. In a fast-growing, complex and resource-constrained setting such as urban India, transparency and citizen participation are not a democratic nicety but a governance imperative. They build the soft tissue of trust between citizens and governments. We have a working model in our panchayati raj institutions, which we must adapt and implement in our cities.
Second, mayors and councils who have meaningful authority over the city in terms of their tenure in office and powers, and authority over functions, funds and staffing are held to measurable and enforceable accountability for development outcomes.
Mayors and councillors are first-mile elected representatives and need to be empowered through both state municipal Acts and through systematic councillor leadership development programmes. City councils need to have better quality infrastructure as the nagara sabha, like the Lok Sabha at the Union and the Vidhan Sabha at the state level. India’s approximately 90,000 elected councillors in cities, of whom about 46% are women, can be champions of change in our neighbourhoods, if only empowered.
Today, our mayors and councillors have no say over critical functions such as planning, public transport, traffic management, water supply and sewerage, environment, public health, gender equity and local economic development. Integrated, coordinated planning and development of our cities requires a single point of political accountability and a governance design to facilitate it. A bevy of bureaucrats across several civic agencies at the city and state levels can never deliver the outcomes we desire in our cities.
Third, municipalities and other institutions serving the city need to possess adequate administrative capacities across spatial planning, street and public space design, financial management, human resource management and digitization.
Six specific measures on capacities include: (1) reforming master planning through high-impact neighbourhood level planning, (2) mandating standards for design, execution and maintenance of streets and public spaces, and reforming procurement basis such standards, (3) formulae-based transfers for cities basis their revenue capacity and funding needs, (4) catalysing municipal borrowings at scale on the back of a public registry of market-valued land in cities and a shelf of credible projects, (5) digital public finance management systems for radical transparency in public funds from their origin to outcomes, and (6) large-scale skilling in various domains of city management, and making the market for municipal shared services centres.
The primary responsibility to fix the above city-systems lies with state governments. The Union government, however, needs to assume thought leadership, facilitate peer learning, evolve common standards and frameworks where relevant, and set aside significantly higher outlays as city-system reform incentives.
For the Union and state governments to get started on city-systems reforms, they would need to gain a new imagination of place-based governance and reimagine their own roles as ecosystem enablers rather than infrastructure providers.
The ministry of housing and urban affairs needs to be reimagined as primarily a place-based ministry rather than only a scheme-based ministry. We need its senior bureaucrats to be organized around places or regions rather than sectors. They need to adopt and be accountable for an integrated view across “economy, environment and equity” with infrastructure and services enabling outcomes across those three Es.
State urban departments, too, need to be organized based on divisions and districts within the state to create place-based specialization and integrated, coordinated governance across the three Es.
State governments should evaluate the district as a unit of governance for India’s smaller cities. Districts already play an active role in panchayati raj institutions. The long tail of around 4,500 smaller cities with a population of less than 100,000 are burgeoning. Around 900 of them have been created by states since Census 2011 without any special incentives.
States do not have the fiscal or human resource capacities to deliver even basic infrastructure and services to them. The district as a unit of governance is well-settled and can effectively build shared capacities across spatially contiguous cities and villages (think common waste management facilities, common teams of engineers and tax collectors, “uberized” field services and common technology backbones) and address balanced development between rural and urban centres. They can also facilitate systematic rural to urban transitions.
The timing is perfect for the new government to strike a bold and imaginative note and embark on much needed city-systems reforms.
Srikanth Viswanathan is chief executive officer, Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.
