India is getting richer every year, but its cities do not 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 is 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 Corp, is the country’s richest. 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, has not allowed people to vote for its leadership since 2015. It could hopefully happen later this year — only because the Indian Supreme Court last month put its foot down.
Illustration: Yusha
This carelessness about local polls is a widespread problem: Last year, Janaagraha estimated that 61 percent of urban governments in 17 of 28 states had their elections delayed.
Residents suffer when it happens, but powerful state-level politicians do not care. That is because they then get to handpick their favorite bureaucrats as stand-in administrators. When the local administration is unelected, it is also unaccountable and unresponsive. It could focus on wringing revenue out of cities without having to do much to provide decent conditions to 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 reported that it was tripling the amount that urban local bodies are supposed to get. However, what is the point if there is nobody there to receive this largesse?
If a town does not 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 is not as if the federal government or state administrations are making up the shortfall. Last week’s budget made a song and dance about 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 percent, for urban rejuvenation by 20 percent and for transportation by 60 percent.
New Delhi’s promises of cash are not worth the paper they are written on. Last year, the amount it spent on urban programs was 40 percent 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 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 for the past eight years.
Even closeness to the centers of power does not protect locals from poor governance. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s long-time home of Gandhinagar, now represented in parliament by his trusted deputy, dealt with a typhoid outbreak last month 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 is 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 could 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 would be forced to endure life in some of the world’s most hellish urban environments.
India is not short of ideas, expertise or funds. The 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.
Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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