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Too Many Cooks in the Urban Services Kitchen

First published in Janaagraha Times (Vol. IV, Issue 2, Feb 2005) by Ramesh Ramanathan, Co-founder, Janaagraha.

Imagine a puppet whose strings are being pulled by different puppeteers: the hands by one, the legs by another, the head and shoulders by a third. Sitting in the audience, the show would not look pretty. City governance in India is similar, being pulled and pushed in different directions — sometimes even torn apart — by a chaotic urban administrative set-up.

Consider the following examples: 

What most people don’t know is that — behind closed doors — these agencies are themselves pointing fingers at each other. “There were 2 lakh vehicles in Bangalore in 1980; this figure is now 20 lakhs. And, during this time, we have had a constant 1,700 constables. How can we manage this?” says the police commissioner.

The city government has to widen the roads to meet this growing vehicular pressure, from which it gets no revenue! Not one paisa of the vehicle registration fee goes into the kitty of the local government.

Who is responsible for vehicle registration?

The Regional Transport Office (RTO), an agency that has no accountability to the local government, nor even to the state government. So they merrily give out new registrations every day, at the rate of thousands of new vehicles that get out of the transport office to promptly get stuck in the traffic jam outside. 

As a result, the city government has little strategic role in determining the destiny of the city, being reduced to a tactical service provider taking care of the garbage and sanitation of these mushrooming developments that it did not create in the first place.

Leave aside these ‘large’ strategic issues. Even normal, day-to-day situations like restructuring a traffic junction, or creating a bus stop have become complex multi-agency coordination problems.

This reality is old news. Many politicians and administrators agree that streamlining urban governance into the local government is the long-term goal; that in the meantime, there must be a credible coordination mechanism between different agencies.

For example, Bangalore alone has six core agencies responsible for a variety of civic functions: BMP, the city government; BDA, the development authority; BMRDA, the regional development authority; BWSSB, the water agency; BMTC, the public transport provider; KSB, the slum board; BTP, the traffic police; BESCOM, the electricity company. There are other related agencies as well.

For years now, there has been talk of inter-agency coordination. The question is, “Why is this not happening?” All the heads of these agencies agree vociferously on the need for such coordination. However, the devil is in the details: how will this coordination be enabled at the ground level, between mid-tier executives and employees. This requires organisation structures that are synchronised. Unfortunately, the reality on the ground is far removed from this. Take a look at Bangalore’s service delivery structures: 

In all these criss-crossing administrative jurisdictions, not one of them is a legitimate political unit. This is important because the political unit has an inherent accountability associated with it. The smallest political unit in any city is a ward, the constituency for the local elected representative. Bangalore has 100 such wards. Unfortunately, in none, — repeat, none — of the above is there overlap between the administrative jurisdictions of these agencies, or a congruence with the ward boundary. The result: the citizen is confused, the local politician is confused, the agency representatives are confused. 

These administrative boundaries are not trivial lines on a map, they are powerful structures: they impact budgeting, planning, expenditures, patronage, transfers, and so on. They reflect organisational energies and inertia. Hence, if we are to talk of coordination between agencies, all such talk is a pipe dream unless we streamline these administrative jurisdictions. By extension, urban governance will remain a pipe dream unless this fundamental architecture is aligned.

These solutions will not emerge from the lofty ideals of the 74th Amendment; they arise out of the grassroot realities of service delivery.

Until we begin to focus on the grassroots and begin cleaning up these agency issues, words like transparency and accountability will remain empty rhetoric to be used in conferences. And the average citizen will continue to watch the puppet show of urban governance being played out like a Shakespearean tragedy by a third-grade theatre troupe.