THE ENERGY FOR URBAN CHANGE – WHERE WILL IT COME FROM?

THE ENERGY FOR URBAN CHANGE – WHERE WILL IT COME FROM?

Just a few hundred yards from my office is a municipality building lying in shambles: the crumbling façade bears a faded sign - “Community Hall, Ward 79”. Overgrown weeds and shattered windows complete the dismal portrait.

All around it are signs of bustling urban activity –corporate office, dhobi ghat, hospital, TV station.

The irony cuts deep: cities across the world have recognized that flexible and innovative solutions only come from grassroot participation, while our governments consistently - and often ruthlessly - deny citizens the opportunity to engage in local government. A few examples from Bangalore:

• A “Ward Vision” campaign got citizens to prepare a vision for their wards. In 10 of the city’s 100 wards, over 2,000 people prepared detailed documents. When they discovered that the city was only collecting 30% of the potential revenues, they offered an innovative plan to raise compliance. Called Ward RECI-P (Revenue Enhancement with Citizen Participation), they suggested that citizens would support the city administrators to increase revenues, with the condition that a portion of the increased revenues be allocated for local ward development.

Hailed by eminent economists and public policy experts as an innovative public finance solution, this proposal is still awaiting a response.

· When a local vegetable/fruit/meat market collapsed, the municipality moved the vendors onto the street with the promise to re-build the market within a few months. The situation resulted in several inconveniences: the market waste being dumped in the drain, blood from the meat market flowing into the local school, local residents complaining of health problems, traffic issues, and so on.

After close to two years of waiting, citizens of the area held a referendum on what needed to be done about the market. Overwhelmingly, the vote was to move the roadside market on to an adjoining public site of the municipality. Local entrepreneurs also promised financial support. The municipality, which had been continuously informed and invited to participate in the process, stated at the end that this solution was untenable, since the proposed location had been identified for another government programme. There was no attempt to explain the situation, or discuss the options with the citizens. A year later, there is no sign of this alternative government programme.

§ There is sketchy documentary evidence to suggest that urban voter rolls have error rates that are 40% - 45%. The Election Commission, sympathetic to civil society initiatives, ordered that voter lists be read out in grama sabhas in rural areas. Unfortunately, there is no equivalent sabha for the urban voter, leaving door-to-door verification as the only alternative. This suffers from two weaknesses: one, it is not a formal exercise of the government machinery; and two, it is extraordinarily time and people intensive. A formal urban sabha could solve the problem, and give the several active citizens an opportunity to engage. Without this, is it any surprise that voter turnout is low and tending to become lower in urban areas?

Improving the quality of our democracy requires deep reforms on many fronts: political, judicial, administrative and so on. These reforms will take time - years if not decades - to wend their way through the due process of decision-making that is the hallmark of a democracy. But what does it mean for an average citizen living in a town? While the urban poor are struggling for survival, the middle-class is ensconced in a passive cocoon where it has restricted itself to watching the tableau of a mai-baap sarkar.

It is here that participation makes its most compelling case: by transforming a passive recipient to an active agent of change. There are substantial theoretical arguments for participation in democratic discourse; however, the most practical argument is that it helps people take some control of their lives, even as they are often confronted by corrupt politicians, indifferent bureaucrats and overburdened courts. While the “big picture” reforms can happen when they do, participation on local issues helps in breaking our problems down to a human scale.

We have already created this space for participation in rural India. Unfortunately, urban participation has few champions: our corporate chieftains are too focused on visible outputs like infrastructure; the media is enamoured with opinion leaders; political scientists and researchers continue to espouse rural decentralisation; while government itself speaks in many mouths and needs public energy to catalyse change. The reality: participation is not sexy enough as an answer to our urban travails – it’s not about big spending, not about the rural masses, not about power or patronage, and not about larger-than-life heroes who can swoop down to rescue our cities.

As we hold our breath and wait for our cities to miraculously transform themselves, urban centres across the world are creating more space for citizens to engage. One of the most extraordinary examples is Porto Alegre in Brazil, where the concept of participatory budgeting began about 15 years ago, and has mushroomed across that country. Over this period, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens from across the social spectrum have engaged in well-designed, carefully structured planning exercises to improve their quality of life. The exercise has been hailed as a beacon of a new empowering democratic movement, giving people control over their lives without disrupting existing governmental structures, or waiting for larger “big picture” change to happen.

For us in India, the real challenge is to create consensus for change, across a range of stakeholders inside and outside government. While there are many reforms required in urban governance, participation ought to claim a place at the head of the list. If this were to happen, one of the first things that citizens would bring to the dead rooms of Community Hall number 79 is their passion and ideas for change. It is time for government to stop behaving like a dog in the manger and give citizens the space.

The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org