WARD SABHAS

Ward Sabhas

Change Your Ward to Change Your World

Two important Amendments to the Constitution in 1994 introduced the twin towers of decentralised government: the 73rd amendment for rural India and 74th amendment for urban India. Both are dysfunctional but for different reasons.

In rural India, while every villager is a member of the gram sabha with a formal voice in decentralized decision-making, the tower is hollow, since the capacity for participation is inadequate and a feudal society acts as a negative force. In urban areas, the capacity for participation is in abundance but the ground floor of the tower is missing, with no legitimacy for citizens to participate. Hence in urban India, democracy is "allowed" only at the ballot box.

Janaagraha's energies have focused on citizen participation in urban local issues in two ways:

The first is to facilitate informal platforms for regular citizen engagement with local government on issues related to ward budgeting and development. These have been called ward sabhas. Currently, citizen communities in 16 out of 100 wards, hold ward sabhas every month with varying processes and varying degrees of success. Click here to find their schedules and contact information.

The ward sabhas provide real-time opportunities for local level leadership to emerge and engage. The focus of Janaagraha’s ward sabha programme is on streamlining the process and tools to maximise participation, efficiency and outcomes. For example, Janaagraha’s ward-online system Janasambandha, provides the technology platform to track citizens’ complaints and government responses. This is a key tool in managing community grievances.

However, ultimately the success of the citizen participation in urban areas will depend upon three factors: citizen tenacity in participating for a better quality-of-life in their neighbourhoods, enlightened self-interest on the part of the corporators, and a legal provision institutionalising citizen participation.

There are two repeated arguments against citizen participation: the first is that the urban citizen is self-centered and doesn’t really care; the second is the argument about the sheer size of the urban population making participation un-wieldy and unrepresentative.

To the first argument: the presumption of apathy cannot be a tenable reason for denying a legitimate role for the urban resident. In fact, giving a role to the citizen places accountability on him as well.

To the second argument: Janaagraha has proposed a simple solution-the "Area Sabha". Each "area sabha” boundary is defined by individual polling station footprints. The polling footprint is the lowest political demarcation based on household numbers of approximately 1,000 voters, which translates to about 300 households per polling booth. Participation embedded around the polling station footprint ensures that decentralisation is not too large to be cumbersome and not too small to be insignificant. Every registered voter within each "area" will have an opportunity to participate through "Area Sabhas" thus allowing equitable representation. The new Ward Committee would therefore need to include nominated citizen representatives from each area sabha in the ward sabhas.

Janaagraha has drafted a new model Municipalities Act that includes a Nagara Raj component. This Nagara Raj component gives every registered urban voter a formal role in the democratic process through the establishment of area sabhas. The Nagara Raj can be introduced as an amendment to the existing municipalities act or as part of the new Model Municipalities Act. We have been making steady progress in advocating this change with governments at different levels across the country.