Issues metropolitan cities face – UPSC GS2

• Factors underlying city governance include spatial planning, municipal capacities, empowered mayors and councils and inter-agency coordination, and ward-level citizen participation.
• Twenty-seven years after the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, these reform agendas continue to be slow in implementation.
• India’s metropolitan cities have weak capacities in finance and staffing.
• Bengaluru’s average percentage of own revenue to total expenditure is 47.9%, Chennai 30.5%, Mumbai 36.1% and Kolkata at 48.4%.
• According to ASICS 2017, Mumbai has the highest number of officers per lakh population at 938 in the country.
• Yet it is abysmally low compared to global cities such as Johannesburg with 2,922 and New York with 5,446 officers per lakh population

Limited powers of mayors

• The leaders steering India’s metropolitan cities are toothless.
• No big metropolitan cities with 10 million-plus population has a directly-elected Mayor.
• Mumbai’s Mayor has a tenure of 2.5 years, Delhi and Bengaluru, a mere one year.
• Mayors do not have full decision-making authority over critical functions of planning, housing, water, environment, fire and emergency services in most cases.
• Our metropolitan cities are far from being local self-governments.
• Parastatal agencies for planning, water and public transport report directly to State governments.
• The State government also largely controls public works and police.
• Globally, metropolitan cities are steered by a directly-elected leader.
• Evolved examples include the Tokyo metropolitan government and recent experimental models such as combined authorities in the United Kingdom and Australia.

• India needs home-grown solutions suited to its context and political realities while imbibing lessons on institutional design from global examples.
• It is time the Central and State governments lead efforts towards a metropolitan governance paradigm.
• The first steps should include empowered Mayors with five-year tenure, decentralised ward level governance, and inter-agency coordination anchored by the city government.

Lack of transparency, accountability and citizen participation

• Transparent cities with institutional platforms encouraging citizen participation improve urban democracy.
• No metropolitan has functional ward committees and area sabhas.
• An absence of citizen participation is worsened by poor transparency in finance and operations.
• As per ASICS 2017, India’s big metropolitan cities on average score 3.04/10 in transparency, accountability and participation.

Significance of smaller cities

• A World Bank report notes that despite the emergence of smaller towns, the underlying character of India’s urbanisation is “metropolitan”.
• Under this metropolitan character, new towns emerge around existing large cities.
• According to a McKinsey report, in 2012, 54 metropolitan cities and their hinterlands accounted for 40% of India’s GDP.
• The report also estimates that by 2025, 69 metropolitan cities, combined with their hinterlands, will generate over half of India’s incremental GDP between 2012 and 2025.
• Despite this, India is yet to begin an active discourse on cohesive metropolitan governance frameworks.
• This indicates that while India’s urban vision should focus on its metropolitan cities to reap the benefit of scale, it shouldn’t ignore smaller cities.
•  Studies by the Centre for Policy Research point that India’s spatial feature exhibits the growth of small towns beyond the economics of large agglomerations.

Conclusion