Amitabh Kant, CEO of NITI Ayog,
wrote the other day in a national daily about the criticality of cities in
pulling the country up by its boot straps. They are critical to most of the missions
of the government that seek to boost the country’s economic growth and
economically lift its people. Whether it is the flagship programmes of “Make in
India” or “Skill India” or “Digital India” or “Smart Cities”, in each one of
them it is the cities which would play the most vital role in rolling them out
and accomplishing them. They will also be critical in tracking economic growth,
job creation and delivery of good quality of life to citizens. Kant thinks in
today’s world it is not countries but cities that compete for resources and
investments and he thereby wants cities to become distinct units of governance
and economy. It is, therefore, necessary, he says, to track the performance of
cities in terms of GDP, job creation, private and public investments and
consumption.
Kant laments that Janaagraha’s annual reviews show Indian cities in very
poor light. While London and New York score 9+ in a scale of 0 to 10 Indian
cities largely score only a poor 4. “Janaagraha”, Wikipedia says, is a
non-profit that aims to strengthen democracy in the
country by working for citizen-participation in urban local government.
Janaagraha aims to spread awareness of the benefits of engaging local
governments and to lobby the Centre to enact legislation to extend the 74th
Amendment of the Constitution of India for more representative local urban
government.
Kant has
enumerated four key systems of good governance of cities: 1. Urban planning and
design, 2. Municipal finances and staffing, 3. Effective political leadership
4. Transparency, accountability and citizen-participation. Because of the poor
reflection of our cities as witnessed by the Janaagraha assessment Kant comes
forward with solutions. To rectify and to overcome all shortcomings Kant has
come up with “what” and “how” to achieve that. According to him, chief
ministers should attach greater importance and priority to cities and also pay
more attention to them. They should prepare a blue print for the city’s
long-term development for 20 to 30 years. At the same time, they should devise
a short term plan with sectoral objectives for 3 to 5 years fixing roadmaps and
milestones allocating responsibilities for delivery. They would also be
required to monitor the progress of achievements of objectives and, presumably,
if necessary, take action for course correction.
Not satisfied
with the current staffing of municipal corporations Kant says that the short
terms of municipal commissioners are not conducive to productive work. He is
also against the culture of obtaining officials/officers on deputation from the
state governments. He feels it vitiates the organisational culture as, he says,
the “rolling stock of deputationists” destroys the “coherence” of the
organisation. He, perhaps, feels that deputationists seldom develop any stake
in the organisation.
All that is well
and good! True, cities are reckoned as the drivers of the econonmy. In describing the modus operandi for making cities units of economic
growth, however, Kant seems to have missed out on one vital link. He has written about what is
wrong with them and how to go about mending the breaches that have occurred but
he has not said who will go about correcting everything that has gone wrong. To
his “what” and “how” what needs to be added is “who” will accomplish what he
wants to be done with the cities, critical as they are, as he thinks, to the
country’s economic progress.
Kant wants the
chief ministers to pay more attention to the cities. But the fact is that the
city administration is already beholden to the state governments for reasons of lack of finances. Some years ago even the prestigious The Economists had opined that
the local bodies in India are subsumed in the government that surrounds them. In
the highly politicised environment politics in India is the art of sycophancy
and every political animal tends to ingratiate himself with the powers that be.
Larger interests of the city and its people are supposedly not all that
important. Besides, the chief minister has his own agenda – obliging his
sycophants, relatives and friends, men from industries or construction or
builders’ lobbies. The last are more important as they contribute moolah to the
chief minister for his personal use or for use by the party. Because of them
the City Development Plan for Bhopal, for instance, has been delayed by ten
years. Thus, the World Economic Forum found these sectors highly corrupt in
India with mark-up of project costs being as much as 50%. Quality thus suffers:
roads develop potholes within months of building/re-laying, water pipes
repeatedly leak with unconscionable loss of millions of gallons of precious
water and sewers breakdown. But nobody is ever brought to book.
That being the
case, and the chief minister being an out-and-out political animal, that too of
Indian variety, who will take care of the cities? That is a big question. In
the current system every individual or the organisation has developed vested
interests. They hardly ever act according to the needs of the general public.
In this mess there is no accountability. One minister in Bhopal admitted to your
reporter once that the state had no system of accountability. No wonder, Indian
cities are in such poor shape.
In such perverse
processes, planning and design or transparency and accountability – Kant’s
first and fourth systems of good governance – are pushed out of the window.
There are numerous instances of cities acquiring ungainly sprawls without any
concern for urban design or planning, conservation of environment, availability
of civic services, etc. The precious commodity of land is distributed using
rules or bending them to cronies who have deep pockets and have no hesitation in
emptying them as favours to the politicians. The cities are, in fact, milked by
the chief minsters and their cohorts to fill their coffers and/or of parties
they belong to to achieve aims of capturing and/or retaining power. Expecting
the busy-in-politicking chief ministers to actively involve themselves in
building citizen-centric cities is a dream that only Kant can see sitting in
his Niti Aayog.
Kant’s two other
key systems of governance – municipal finances and staffing and effective
political leadership – also suffer from the malaise that has been only outlined
above. State politics ensures depressed civic taxes to keep the municipality
always in financial doldrums – dependent on the state. Vested interests take
care of staffing. Deputations are not sinful per se; they are so only when
deputation is used to fill posts that can well be manned by the municipalities’
own employees. But no, here too sycophancy and politics take over so that
political lackeys could be provided with sinecures. As for political leadership
one can only look up to the Mayor who, in fact, in most cases is the chief
minister’s or the party’s man and yet is largely ineffective, more so if his
party does not have majority in the municipal council.
Politicians have
vitiated the system of governance in the country, including of the city
governments. Having done so they have only one objective – that of maintaining
status quo so that the system could remain a milch cow. Having seen the
government functioning from close quarters, Kant strangely expects politicians
to disturb the status quo to their own disadvantage - a naive thought by any stretch of imagination.
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