India is getting richer, but its cities are unlivable

By Mihir Sharma

India is getting richer every year, but its cities don’t seem to be getting any more livable. Not because the country is too poor, or because leaders lack ambition, but because urban citizens are starved of funds and deprived of representation. And the government’s in no hurry to fix it, even though people are dying as a result.

Mumbai’s skyline is dotted with opulent glass towers, and it calls itself India’s commercial capital. The civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, is the country’s richest. And yet residents have lived for years with no say in how their city was being run. When it finally held local polls last month, it was after a gap of nearly a decade.

The equivalent city authority in Bengaluru, home to world-beating tech companies, hasn’t allowed people to vote for its leadership since 2015. It will hopefully happen later this year — only because the Supreme Court put its foot down last month. This carelessness about local polls is a widespread problem: Last year, the urban governance nonprofit Janaagraha estimated that 61% of urban governments in 17 of 28 states had their elections delayed.

Residents suffer when this happens, but powerful state-level politicians don’t care. That’s because they then get to handpick their favorite bureaucrats as stand-in administrators. When the local administration is unelected, it’s also unaccountable and unresponsive. It can focus on wringing revenue out of cities without having to do much to provide decent conditions to urban taxpayers.

Technically, cities should get a share of the national pool of taxes. In fact, the commission in charge of dividing revenue up between New Delhi, various states, and local bodies recently reported that it was tripling the amount that urban local bodies are supposed to get. What’s the point, however, if there’s nobody there to receive this largesse?

If a town doesn’t hold elections, the rules say it misses out on these grants. Mumbai lost almost half a billion dollars because of this; other towns lost less, but they had far fewer resources to begin with and it hurt them even more.

It’s not as if the federal government or state administrations are making up the shortfall. Last week’s budget made a song and dance about various new grants supposedly targeting smaller towns. But the reality is that vital lines of urban finance have been cut. Funding for affordable housing shrank by 6%, for urban rejuvenation by 20%, and for transport by 60%.

In any case, New Delhi’s promises of cash aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Last year, the amount it actually spent on urban programs was 40% less than what was announced.

One funding cut was particularly distressing: The government’s flagship initiative for urban sanitation had its budget halved, just weeks after dozens died in the central city of Indore after drinking water that had been contaminated by raw sewage. This is a town that the government has ranked as the cleanest in the country every single year of the past eight.

Even closeness to the centers of power doesn’t protect town-dwellers from poor governance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long-time home of Gandhinagar, now represented in parliament by his trusted deputy, had to deal with a typhoid outbreak in January after the water pipelines developed “several leaks” and let in sewage. At least 5,500 people in 26 cities across the country fell ill last year because of water contaminated by sewage due to faulty, decades-old pipelines — and that’s just the cases that have been recorded and reported.

India has failed to give city residents the basics: uncontaminated water, breathable air, and a government they can vote out if it fails them. Until it takes democratic accountability seriously and gives elected urban leaders the power to tax and the authority to act, citizens will be forced to endure life in some of the world’s most hellish urban environments.

India isn’t short of ideas, expertise or funds. Our cities are struggling because they are treated as outposts of an empire: Administered by unaccountable viceroys and dangerous to the people forced to live in them.