Cycle of urban distress, one uproar after another

It seems every few weeks, something is happening in government that agitates a lot of people – the latest is the cost of street sweeping machines that the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) proposes to rent. In social media and in the press, this has triggered a round of outrage. Before this was the chaos on the Outer Ring Road, and a little before that, we were agonising about potholes. The next one is probably a few weeks away.

What’s common to these outpourings? First, there is a large deficit of trust that makes people instinctively believe that what they are seeing is one more in a long line of loot and maladministration. That’s not always the fault of the current administrators, but it is a reality they need to confront, nonetheless.

The second common feature in a lot of these flare-ups is that many decisions in government appear to be taken at odds with expert knowledge, planning or even common sense. Wouldn’t the roads need to be in proper condition before we spend a ton of money on machines to clean them? Is this really the way to fill a pothole? Wouldn’t the road network in East Bengaluru need to be complete to manage traffic there? Do we need a tunnel road through the city, especially when a proposed Metro line would be parallel to it?

There are also issues of governance. Cleaning streets is a municipal function, so why is GBA contracting for the machines rather than the five municipal corporations? And what is the source of funds – will GBA assert control over our property taxes and other revenues of the corporations? Will elected corporators – one assumes there will be an election one day! – accept this? There is no clarity.

Managing our cities was never easy. When it became clear in the 1990s that India lacked a proper governance framework for the inevitable urbanisation, Parliament enacted the 74th Amendment to the Constitution, which envisioned devolving power and finances to local elected councils. In practice, however, states have been reluctant to let go of their powers and have found various less-than-legal ways of hanging on to them.

That has come at a price. Elected representatives of local councils struggled to provide public goods and services because they lacked the means. Meanwhile, many responsibilities were given to parastatals, but without public accountability, they’ve been happy to just mark attendance and plod along.

But one can’t go far or fast on a potholed road, to use a metaphor from these times. And jugaad has its limits. Indian cities look shabby, and they struggle for economic and social vitality even when judged alongside cities in other developing countries. And their leadership is so disempowered that people are more curious about mayoral races in London and New York than in their own cities.

In a late wake-up, the Union government has formed a few working groups shepherded by the National Institute of Urban Affairs to propose reforms in a few areas, such as governance of rural areas that are becoming urban.

Both UPA and NDA have tried their versions of large schemes to transform the urban landscape. By and large, those have failed. But that’s not because experts proposed the wrong things. It’s primarily because, after listening to good advice from well-meaning people, our political leaders chose to continue doing the wrong things anyway.

The challenges of urban India are social and political; they are not technical or managerial. We’re not going to overcome them by discovering a new scheme or recipe for doing things better. Our only hope of turning the corner towards well-managed cities lies in the one thing we have never tried – constitutional and local self-government.

During a recent conversation about the proposed (at that time) GBA Act, one of the participants in the discussion pointed out that we’ve repeatedly tried to govern the city in different ways – changing boundaries, merging and demerging areas, expanding the boundaries of the city, creating new parastatals, etc. The one thing we haven’t tried properly is what’s in the Constitution.

The outrages will continue. They could even get more frequent. We can either wring our hands, respond chaotically and frantically, and propose one more tweak of a broken system, or we can do the sensible and democratic thing. Hold elections regularly, devolve funds and power to councils and wards, and most importantly, keep the state and national governments out of the administration of urban India.

We need to believe that when people self-govern through local councils and wards, they’re more likely to get things right, or that they’ll change course when they make mistakes because it is in their interest to do so. The alternative is to lurch from one uproar to the next.

The writer is a social entrepreneur, founder of Mapunity and LVBL, and co-founder, Lithium, wakes up with hope for the city and society, goes to bed with a sigh.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.