BUILDING THE HR INFRASTRUCTURE OF OUR CITIES

BUILDING THE HR INFRASTRUCTURE OF OUR CITIES

In a recent interaction with representatives of urban development from Punjab, I asked about the capital expenditure being taken up in the state’s larger cities like Amritsar and Patiala. The answer was a surprisingly meagre Rs 20 - 25 crores annually. To put this figure in perspective, per-capita capital investment for urban infrastructure in India is estimated at about Rs 50,000, which means a city with a population of 10 lakhs will need to invest around Rs. 5,000 crores for an acceptable quality of life for its residents. For Punjab’s larger cities, assuming this is done over a ten year period, this will require a twenty-fold increase from current spending levels.

Over the next six years, the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) will give Rs 50,000 crores to 63 cities, as part funding for a total outlay of Rs 100,000 crores for urban infrastructure development. Unprecedented in the country’s history, these investments signal a welcome change in public policy, and are a long-overdue acknowledgement of urban India’s legitimate requirements. It seems that some of Amritsar’s funding issues will be addressed through JNNURM.

However, one troubling question is the ability of our cities to actually absorb these vast sums of money, and implement large-scale urban infrastructure projects. The past decades have created emaciated municipalities, fed on a starvation diet of funds, generating appallingly poor quality urban assets. While it was high time that these trickles of finance changed, the transition from feeding on drips to gushers will expose the deep gaps in our urban management systems.

An Asian Development Bank assessment of Uttaranchal’s urban situation stated, “Inadequate urban institutional and financial frameworks and capacities are the major cause of the prevailing poor conditions in urban service delivery. (Cities) cannot effectively perform their duties as they generally lack the required skills, appropriate management tools, and efficient working culture.”

This is a classic challenge of decentralisation. As more functions are being devolved to local governments, there are the associated problems of capacity on many fronts – governance, financial management, project management skills to create urban infrastructure, and operational capacity to manage these assets.

A report on decentralisation and urban infrastructure by Harvard University for the United Nations stated, “ (While) decentralisation has usually led to increases in public expenditures on infrastructure.…lack of capacity at the local level has emerged as the single most critical constraint impeding program performance and udermining the sustainability of achievements.”

Understanding these capacity constraints needs to begin with getting a handle on the reality of staffing patterns in our cities. Consider the data on urban employees in Karnataka state in the table.

Urban staff in Karnataka is disproportionately concentrated in the lowest skill grade -- Group D staff account for 75% of the total, while Group A are less than 1%. Other challenges include the significant number of vacancies, poor qualifications and mismatch of skills, especially in technical areas. Because there had been no recruitment of Grade B officers since 1982, a 1992 Government Order allowed municipal employees to be promoted to the state cadre without meeting any basic qualifications. As a result, 109 cities are headed by promotee officers who have insufficient qualifications to carry out their tasks; some do not even possess a college degree. These are the same people who will have to head their administrations, managing hundreds of crores of urban infrastructure projects.

While the appointment of IAS officials often brings capacity and professionalism to cities, this structure also directs the accountability of these officials upward rather than toward local politicians or citizens. Local politicians have very limited ability to hold appointed municipal officials accountable, which in turn limits citizens’ ability to hold local politicians accountable.

Even the oft-cited solution of outsourcing key municipal functions is tough to undertake if cities don’t have the skills to enter into contracts, enforce service level agreements and demand accountability from private service providers. The same ADB report on Uttaranchal says, “Capacity constraints coupled with a lack of an enabling framework also impact on the ability to outsource urban service delivery to the private sector.”

We need to comprehensively revamp the human capital dimension in urban management, on multiple fronts: rewrite state cadre books; include modern urban management curricula in state and district-level training institutes; allow calibrated outsourcing of selected functions through standardised templates. While there are no short-cuts in responding to this deep structural issue, change can be kick-started by enabling contract recruitment of professionals in key functions like finance, engineering, and urban planning. All this will take foresight, funding, and forbearance. We need to build the HR infrastructure in our urban sector, alongside the hard assets being created.

In this, we could take a leaf out of South Africa’s book. Ten years ago, that country took up a programme to improve their urban infrastructure. Titled the South African Municipal Infrastructure Program, it was an ambitious mission to ensure a basic level of urban services for all citizens. The government initially earmarked 5 percent of project funds for training of contractors and workers for building up local governments’ technical and managerial capacity. However, as the capacity gaps became apparent, this allocation was increased to 10 percent. JNNURM has also earmarked 5% of funding for capacity building; it remains to be seen how these funds are actually used in meaningful capacity enhancements.

If our cities are to become great places to live, our city governments must become good if not great organisations – the first simply cannot happen without the second. Over the next decade, the pace and quality of urban infrastructure rollout will depend on our concurrent investment in the quality of city administration. The extraordinary neglect of urban management in India over the past fifty years will haunt us as we go about the patient and relentless task of building the HR infrastructure of our municipalities.

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The author is founder of Janaagraha. ramesh@janaagraha.org