BULLDOZERS AND BUILDING BYLAWS
BULLDOZERS AND BUILDING BYLAWS
One of the most contentious issues rocking every city in the country today is building violations. From Ullasnagar on the outskirts of Mumbai, to Delhi, to Bangalore and Kolkatta, what began as minor localised nuisances is now exploded across neighbourhoods, and sometimes even across entire cities. The judiciary has been brought in, our city governments are being embarrassed with acknowledgement of violations at astonishing levels of 70 to 80%. The direction to demolish all illegal constructions is leaving many stakeholders agitated - senior officials of city governments, grass-root employees who have to face public wrath, elected representatives who are often being accused of being at the heart of this controversy, and citizens who find themselves simultaneously as both perpetrators and victims.
As the bulldozers grind to work, we scratch our heads and wonder, “Where did we go wrong, and what is the answer?” Are we so dysfunctional and pathetic a society that we are constantly looking to break the law at every conceivable opportunity? Or should we look deeper to see whether we are simply responding to a set of ridiculous legal guidelines that creates this extraordinary confusion and deliberate non-compliance in the first place? With few exceptions, there is little science or logic to the building setbacks, the height restrictions, the f.s.i./f.a.r. limits; there is no apparent larger public good that is being served by these guidelines, these bylaws are not nested into a larger coherent neighbourhood zoning or city planning framework. And so if one discerns the forest for the trees in the cacophony of how our cities are getting built, we can see that - without exonerating anyone - what is deeply flawed is not so much our citizens or our politicians or our bureaucrats, but the underlying “rules of the game” themselves, i.e. the legal provisions.
If we need to start making our buildings, our neighbourhoods and our cities more compliant, we need to revisit and redefine our entire city planning, zoning and building bylaw as well as enforcement processes. This means rewriting the appropriate sections in the respective State Municipalities’ Acts - I am referring collectively to all urban laws that affect cities as “Municipalities’ Acts”, although most states have multiple provisions in various documents, for instance the Town and Country Planning Acts.
One reason to club all these issues together is that the challenges are not restricted to building violations alone. The same thread of reasoning repeats itself in almost every other instance: how our cities manage their finances, their obligation to be transparent in their functioning, their obligations to the poor, the processes of creating roads and putting out tenders, the handling of solid waste, the opportunities for citizens to involve themselves in local governance…. in short, in every municipal function. A Municipalities’ Act is like an operating manual for a city. And today, we are working with outdated manuals. At the heart of all that we see as wrong with how our cities are run are the underlying legal documents that define how our cities ought to be run.
Over the last 100 years, very little effort has been directed at making these underlying documents robust and responsive to meet the challenges of our cities. The first Municipalities Acts in our country were written in the 1880s, credit going to Lord Ripon, who ushered in the era of local government in a structured institutional form. After this, there was little change in the legal provisions for several decades. After Independence, given the extraordinary challenges facing our public institutions, urban management was understandably not a high priority, and most states adopted the legacy documents of pre-Independence with few marginal changes. Over the past five decades, these documents have been tinkered with and loaded with amendment upon amendment, with the result that today they are ghastly, unwieldy traps that can be interpreted and acted upon only by those with the most arcane, intricate knowledge of the legal system.
Even when the 74th Constitutional Amendment was passed in 1993, requiring that urban local governments become an independent and legitimate tier of our federal system, most states did not use the opportunity to re-visit their Municipalities’ Acts, and chose rather to make some marginal amendments. This was despite the fact that the 74th Amendment demanded substantial fundamental reform in how our cities would manage themselves - self-government with accountability directly to the people and not to another tier of government sitting above it.
The result is that our cities today have no vision, no capacity to execute their responsibilities efficiently, and no flexibility to respond to changing demands. We are floundering about, lost in the giant legal maze that we have created for ourselves.
There is no substitute to revisiting our Municipalities’ Acts from first principles. After all, these are legal documents, not divine instruments: previous generations had written them for their times, and it is our obligation now to re-write them, in a manner that respond to the challenges and opportunities that our cities are faced with today. We have the ideas, the expertise, the democratic institutional processes to undertake these tasks, but we simply don't seem to have the collective will. Why? Because Indians always choose expediency over what is structurally sound, but might take a little longer to realise. We are willing to spend decades looking unsuccessfully for short-term fixes, rather than a few focused years on developing fundamental solutions. Unfortunately, this approach will not work with managing our cities. At some point, we will have to acknowledge that urban governance is not trivial stuff, and that it cannot be done without a sound legal framework. If we continue to try and run our cities on-the-fly, adopting our “chalta-hai, thoda adjust kar le” attitude, we should expect the kind of crises that we are currently facing: bringing in the bulldozers to clean up the mess that our Municipalities’ Acts have created.
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The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org