Covid second wave A case for local governance at ward levels – The Times of India Blog

Take a look around you. We are in the middle of an unprecedented situation, something that has never been experienced before and we all hope that we dont have to ever experience it again. While we all are tirelessly working to care for others or for those who we love, it is important to think ways to prepare our cities for all kind of future disasters, as this is not the last one we are struggling with. As the Covid wave surges, there is concern that challenges will amplify and undermine Indias economic growth. Perhaps India is at a critical moment where it can preserve and build on the gains from the first major wave.

Both the waves of the pandemic have shown how neighbours and neighbourhoods have been more effective in helping each other out in a pandemic that has spread like wildfire through cities. Citizens groups, Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) and community organizations at local level have been able to come together to trace hospitals, medical supplies and oxygen sources. Many have pooled together to even look after Covid-affected families with food, grocery and medicines.

So what worked here? Where we have missed the bus? And moving forward what should be the Indias governance model?

Technically, Indian lawmakers voted for governance model way back in 1992 with the 74th Amendment to the Constitution enhancing the power of Urban Local Bodies. The 74th CAA made a revolutionary change by recognizing local governments right to exist through the following mandatory provisions: (1) constitution of municipalities, (2) composition of municipalities, (3) holding of regular elections, under the supervision of the state election commissions, (4) protection against arbitrary dissolution of local elected bodies by higher levels of government, (5) constitution and composition of ward committees to ensure greater proximity to citizens, and (6) reservation of seats for women and other marginalized groups.

Unfortunately, it never got fully implemented and states have not ensured that power devolves to the local governments. The model of Wards Committees established as a governance model by our policy leaders did not work. A major objective of providing for Wards Committees in the 74th Constitution Amendment was to enable closer interaction between the people and their elected representatives and thereby more sensitive responses to local needs and accountability of the elected persons to their constituencies could be obtained. We rarely saw local councillors emerging as a force to reckon with during these crises.

We saw during the Covid pandemic in 2020, some commissioners worked with the councillors, who in turn relied on RWAs and citizen volunteers to further micro-manage the healthcare related activities. In fact, in an interview to Magicbricks, the then Commissioner of Bruhat Bengaluru Maha Nagara Palike (BBMP) called the RWAs the fourth tier of governance.

When the first national lockdown was declared, images of migrants marching on foot to their hometowns and villages, tugged at the worlds heartstrings. This was primarily because though they live and work in the city, the migrant population still does not have voting rights or any right whatsoever in a city where they may have worked for several years or even decades. Many are part of the informal workforce, but do not have any documentary evidence of their inclusion in the ward. This, despite the fact that they avail of primary and secondary health and education services, contribute to the economy of the ward and also function as a critical part of that economy as maids, drivers, ironing teams, guards, gardeners, cooks and the like.

The defining objectives of the governmental/institutional instruments of policy and programmatic restructuring has to refocus on inclusiveness, safety and health aspects.

The pandemic highlighted the following common concerns

The preparedness, response and recovery of cities from future pandemics and crises rests on robust governance systems. A fundamental shift and redefining the city mandates, roles and responsibilities of actors at Central, State and Local levels is mandatory for new age transformations. The big focus is to translate lessons learned from this pandemic into the citys institutional and governance frameworks to reduce urban inequalities and burden of share on marginalized people. This requires going back to the drawing board and start thinking about long term structural changes and reforms with a focused approach for resilient governance to get back on track for sustainable and smart growth.

Furthermore, existing bottlenecks and barriers that have withheld implementation of critical reforms must be removed. The municipalities have been entrusted with 18 core responsibilities under Article 243W, the Twelfth Schedule.

This includes:

There are many reasons why they are not able to execute these functions efficiently or many times not at all. The first is lack of capacities at the local levels.

Decentralization and fiscal federalism is a must to brings local governments and users close to urban services and development. The functions, functionaries and finances have to go together for any process of devolution to be meaningful. In order to enable people be able to understand the link between their vote and the consequences of such a vote in terms of provision of public goods and services, contemporary ways of accountability should be explored. The principle of subsidiarity should be made used to devolve funds, functionaries and functions to different levels ward committees/area sabhas, cities and regions.

Decentralization should be based on the principle of subsidiarity (Also recommended by the II Administrative Reforms Commission, 2008). The principle of subsidiarity stipulates that functions shall be carried out closest to citizens at the smallest unit of governance possible and delegated upwards only when the local unit cannot perform the task. The citizens delegate those functions they cannot perform, to the community, functions that the community cannot discharge are passed on to local governments in the lowest tiers, from lower tiers to larger tiers, from local government to the state governments, and from the States to the Union. Many years ago, the city council in San Jose in the US, refused Cisco a new tower because it felt that the existing local infrastructure needed to be augmented to hold so many new jobs, traffic, housing needs and even physical infrastructure such as water, power and sewerage systems.

Secondly, local leadership must be encouraged to innovate and leapfrog from business-as-usual tools and technologies. This really means that role of Central and state governments should be to support by creating conditions, enabling environment and necessary tools to encourage and incentivize cities to make local governments directly accountable to citizens, whereas, the role of cities should be focused on providing better services, while balancing fiscal and functional imperatives.

Unless this forms part of the larger vision, any incremental fixes to making a city liveable will lead to further infrastructural collapse and deterioration in quality of living. Being the engines of socio-economic development, it is the cities which are going to be the lead actors in the nations economic growth. Given this state of affairs, the following shloka from Bhagwat Geeta and its beautiful interpretation by Prof. B. Mahadevan in his article on Meaning of Life and Innovation provides us the way forward. 2.22

In this Shloka, Lord Krishna reminds us that discarding old ideas and mind-sets is a very important prerequisite for moving forward. Innovation requires inheriting new ideas and it happens only when old ideas are discarded. When the dress that we have been using has worn out, it is a natural behaviour on our part to discard it and in its place have new ones. Lord Krishna says that in a similar way when the soul comes to a conclusion that the physical body that it currently occupies has outlived its purpose, it merely discards the body and inherits another. Viewed from this perspective, death could be an opportunity and one step for the soul to progress in its journey. In the context of urban governance, it implies that the constitutional provisions need to be revisited for diagnosis of the reasons that have not permitted it to have visible impact and reinvent structures and processes of urban governance. The constitutional provisions need to be given altogether a new garb.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Covid second wave A case for local governance at ward levels - The Times of India Blog