UBIQUITOUS POTHOLES; MONSOON FLOODING; traffic jams and gridlocks; power and water shortages; runaway omnibuses; no parking space; itchy-palmed traffic policemen and municipal corporation employees. To that list add noxious air quality and millions of viruses looking for warm bodies. The weight of evidence is overwhelming: 21st century India’s chaotic, ill-governed cities are in meltdown.
As slums proliferate and spread through India’s cities, the response of the academy and intelligentsia is mere lamentation, breast-beating, and bleats for improved civic governance of by all-at-sea municipal corporations. Intelligent solutions such as enforcement of the 74th Amendment which would devolve civic administration to ward committees comprising local property owners (see https://www.educationworld.in/enforce-74th-amendment/); switching to the mayoral system of civic governance with a directly elected mayor presiding over a “three-tier set-up” comprising civic administration, engineering and maintenance wings as suggested by brilliant architect and civic planner Gautam Bhatia (Times of India, November 18), get short shrift.
The plain truth is that the country’s municipal corporations and affiliated civic organisations are chock-a-block with engineers, technicians and bureaucrats with ornamental certification from low-grade state government colleges. They have rock-bottom education qualifications and obsolete skills.
Moreover even from this muddy pool, many are recruited on the basis of kith, kin and caste considerations and have greatness thrust upon them. Expecting them to solve complex urban design and management problems is to flog a dead horse. Wake up folks, you have everything to lose!
