As part of the Delhi-Mumbai-Industrial Corridor Development Corporation (DMICDC), India’s biggest ever infrastructure project, there is a plan to build 24 integrated cities by 2040, out of which seven are supposed to be ready by 2019. How can we get governance right in these ‘integrated’ cities?
DLF city in Gurgaon has been touted as the largest private township in Asia, with over 250 MNC offices located there, and 60,000 cars added to its roads every month.
However, there are many ills that plague this millennium city — the Centre for Science and Environment estimates that the demand for water supply in the city is 225 LPCD but per capita availability of supply is only 107 LPCD, after leakage losses. While the city’s area covered by the sewerage network is 50-60 per cent, the population covered is only 30 per cent.
According to the Census 2001 town directory, Gurgaon’s road length was only 1.23 km of road (both surfaced and unsurfaced) per 1,000 of its 200,000 population then.
With a rapid rise in population to now over 1.6 million, per capita road availability would likely have only declined further. Power outages go up to 4-6 hours a day during peak summer, resulting in a significant share of power supply being left to captive generation in upscale condominiums and swanky office complexes.
In other words, to say that Gurgaon is staring at an impending civic infrastructure catastrophe would be an understatement. The reason why this is important to understand is that many of Gurgaon’s problems — poor planning, lack of administrative will, crumbling urban infrastructure, and chronic apathy to civic services — are typical of Indian cities.
JAMSHEDPUR’S SUCCESS
Jamshedpur is also a private township. However, the city has a sound industrial base with a considerable percentage of the population engaged in industrial activities. Jamshedpur was conferred the ISO 14001 (EMS) certification for civic and municipal services. It was rated the second-best in the country by ORG Marg Nielsen on quality of life index in 2008.
The town was ranked seventh in the list of 441 cities and towns in India on sanitation and cleanliness by the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, in 2010. It was selected for the United Nations Global Compact Cities pilot programme.
What are some safeguards that ensure Jamshedpur-type of city development, and prevent DLF-type city failures?
Municipal services were provided in Jamshedpur by Tata Steel’s town division unit which operated as a cost-centre for over 97 years. However, its operations were impacted by financial constraints (reportedly incurring a deficit of around Rs 40 crore ($8.7 million) every year in operating various municipal services that were considered obligatory duties.
The town division of Tata Steel also was impacted by limited human resources and lack of exposure to modern technologies and processes that hampered the effective provision of essential services like water supply and waste management. The town division was under pressure to increase its scale of operations given the rapid population growth in the periphery of its service area.
NEW UTILITY
In order to address these issues, Tata Steel signed a two-year technical partnership with Veolia Water, an international water company. The tie-up sought to provide management and technical consultancy to Tata Steel.
Thus Tata Steel’s decision to corporatise the town division unit enabled the expansion and improvement of services, greater efficiency, and financial viability. Thus was created Jamshedpur Utilities and Services Company (JUSCO), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Steel, on August 25, 2003. JUSCO was carved out of the town division for improving the quality of civic services and for turning Jamshedpur into a model town with world class facilities.
A partnership between Tata Steel and JUSCO was formalised through an agreement with clearly defined performance standards. Under its agreement with Tata Steel, Veolia Water continued to support JUSCO through 2005. Today, it is the only private operator in India that provides comprehensive municipal services to about 500,000 people in Jamshedpur out of its 700,000 population, hoping to cover the entire population over the next couple of years.
JUSCO, which was carved out of Tata Steel from its town services division in 2004, is today India’s only comprehensive urban infrastructure service provider. The intent has been to make it a model town with world class facilities. This initiative of converting a cost-centric service into a commercial customer-oriented company is the first of its kind in India.
The purpose of setting up a separate utility was to provide integrated world class utility services including water supply, power supply, waste management, and other allied civic services to the citizens.
NO MULTIPLE AGENCIES
So what can we learn from these two contrasting experiences? Multiple agencies providing different types of civic services, with unclear accountability and non-transparent functioning and performance standards are a bane at the city governance level. Indian cities are typically characterised by conflicts between multiple agencies on who should provide roads, build service lanes, construct flyovers, maintain public parks, provide sewage and no one seems to have the answer, with authorities passing the buck all the time.
This also ails the Gurgaon-Delhi expressway, with multiple authorities passing the blame and users left running around in circles. ‘Integrated’ townships must address this in order to ensure development of well-planned cities that boast of world class urban infrastructure and public service provision.
Unified authority, with clear and effective lines of accountability and transparent performance standards are indispensable to citizen-centric governance.
Equally, what should not be mistakenly ‘learnt’ from these experiences? Often, ‘outsourcing’ is understood as the lesson from such experiences.
This is not correct. Outsourcing has its uses, but is not the same as devolution of powers, or transfer of responsibility, and the city authority should remain fully responsible for service provision, lest outsourcing is practised as a convenient way of transferring blame for poor service delivery.
And the governance mechanisms have to be right first time. The long-term cost of errors at the planning stage is huge and recurring.
Let’s get the governance model right in these ‘integrated’ cities by getting rid of multiple agencies/service providers and ensure coordinated and hopefully sequential development of cities.
The answer, therefore, also lies in not always creating new institutions to tackle emerging problems, but strengthening and consolidating existing ones.
(The authors are respectively with Public Affairs Centre and IDRC. The views are personal.)
(This article has been corrected - Gurgaon's population is over 1.6 million and not 16 million as originally stated. The error is regretted.)