CITYZEN. Municipal bodies — the bigger, the better

There seems to be a growing belief in official circles that the main problem with our city corporations is their size. The municipal corporation of Delhi was divided into three with very limited benefits for its citizens. This has not deterred official circles in Bengaluru from moving in the same direction. Newspaper reports suggest that the municipal corporation of this city too is likely to be split into three. And there is little reason to believe that this will be a dramatic success either.

The case for splitting the corporations is based on the conviction that the problem with our metropolitan management systems is the absence of adequate centralised monitoring. The inefficiency and corruption that exists is believed to be the result of the officers at the top having too many issues and areas to personally attend to. This assumes that problems of corruption are mainly at the lower end and those at the top are not affected by this malaise. While it would nice to go along with this perception, recent major scams suggest that corruption is a problem as much at the top as at the bottom of the municipal hierarchy.

Indeed, when we look at the specific challenges India’s cities have faced in recent years it becomes quite apparent that very few of them are related to the size of the corporation. Bengaluru’s garbage crisis was the result of administrators and citizens thinking they could simply throw all their garbage in the countryside. When the rural areas revolted, the city was finally forced to look at the logical operations of setting up plants to use the garbage to generate power or cooking fuel. This shift in thinking would be as relevant for a small corporation as a large one.

There may even be areas where a reduction in the size of a corporation can become a further constraint. The economy of a city cannot always be splintered into smaller units. An industrial area in one part of the city may appear quite independent in terms of its dealings with the corporation. But the success of such an area depends on how it relates to other parts of the city. Even if the bulk of the workers reside close to it, it would need to access labour from other parts of the city. If the city is split into multiple administrative bodies there would be little reason for one corporation to care about the requirements of another.

Politically too, three corporations need not necessarily be better than one. As different parts of the city have very different incomes and hence potential to raise local revenue, the financial health of the three corporations is unlikely to be the same. The corporations that do poorly in resource generation would demand additional support from the State government. If the State government ignores this demand it would face considerable resentment from this part of the city. And if it accepts this demand it would only generate resentment in other parts of the city that do not receive this additional support.

The real problem with our corporations is not their size per se, but inappropriate levels of decentralisation. Very often, activities that are best organised and controlled at the ward level are centralised at the level of the city. But in our clamour for decentralisation we have to be careful that we do not transfer to the wards what is better done for the city as a whole. Both these characteristics can be seen even in a narrow area like garbage management. Garbage collection is a local activity that is best done at the ward level. But garbage processing plants are typically of a scale that requires them to cover more than one ward.

What is needed then is an urban administrative mechanism that recognises the appropriate level of centralisation or decentralisation for each activity in the city. It should be flexible enough to make economic policy for the city as a whole, even as it decentralises activities like garbage collection to the ward level. A large corporation catering to the entire city with specific activities decentralised to either the zonal or the ward level would be the way forward.

For such a large metropolitan corporation which allows for effective decentralisation to succeed, it would need to acknowledge the multiple roles that go into making effective urban management. In order to take democratisation from the realm of media statements to practice it would need to provide a role for elected representatives who have a stake in the city, including MLAs. It will have to demarcate clear roles for all players including civil society and experts. It is difficult to see how merely breaking up existing inefficient corporations will address these challenges.

The writer is a professor at the School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore