CONCLUDING SEMINAR
of the Indo-European research programme on

Urban Actors, Policies and Governance in four Indian Metropolitan Cities

Jointly organised by
Centre de Sciences Humaines de New Delhi (CSH)
and
the India International Centre

Date : 23rd-24th  January 2007
Venue : India International Centre, New Delhi

DAY I

Session I. Urban governance in the four metropolises: an overview of the main initiatives of the past decade

Chair: Prof. Niraja Gopal Jayal (Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)
Discussant:  Prof. Kuldeep Mathur (Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)

“Assessing Urban Governance in Hyderabad. Strong Reforms and Weak City Government“ 
Dr. Loraine Kennedy (Centre for the Study of India and South Asia, CNRS-EHESS, Paris)

Among large cities in India, Hyderabad has been at the forefront of municipal reforms in areas such as municipal finance, partial privatisation via public-private partnership arrangements for the delivery of urban services, and “good governance” through measures aimed at improving transparency and accountability of the government. The objective of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of the various initiatives aimed at implementing new forms of urban governance in Hyderabad and the actors involved in the process. It focuses on the experience of political decentralisation, which is considered here to be a vital component of governance reforms. It attempts to assess the political capacity of the elected councillors and examine their relationship to the municipal administration and to other levels within the regional political system. The councillors entered office in 2002 under new legislation ostensibly designed to activate the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, after a gap of more than a decade in municipal elections. The study includes an analysis of recent efforts to enhance public participation in civic affairs and the consequences for political parties and elected representatives.

“Urban governance in Mumbai”
Dr. Marie-Hélène Zérah (Institute for Research on Development, Paris, and CSH)

On the one end, Bombay is the « Prima Urbs » of India. It rose to an economic dominant position from the middle of the 1890s, it is the most vibrant and cosmopolitan city in India and it did play a significant role in social reforms and in the independence struggle. On the other end, the city is repeatedly on the verge of an infrastructure crisis (filthy in the 19th century, exploding and overcongested post independence, declining in the 1980s and 1990s, dying and bursting in the seams in today’s actual discourse). Our study period started with the 1992-1993 horrendous riots that left deep scars on the social fabric of Bombay (and the March 1993 blasts) to the floods of 26th July 2005, which blatantly displayed the deficiencies of basic infrastructure and governance. In between these two landmark dates, Bombay became Mumbai (in 1995), a symbol of the strength of the Shiv Sena on the city politics in the 1990s. The city expanded beyond its municipal limits into a large urban agglomeration. Finally, the process of deindustrialisation that started in the 1980s with the closure of the textile mills and the rising real estate trends have reshaped the socio-economics of the city, reduced the share of formal employment and led to a process of gentrification. Today, Mumbai (including part of the agglomeration) contributes to 40% of the state GDP of Maharashtra and to 4% of the Indian GDP but the city is plagued with infrastructure bottlenecks and deficit as well as acute landholdings inequities and a colossal demand-supply gap in housing, that leaves 50% of the population living in slums.
The Mumbai stage being set, this paper tries to provide a focused overview of urban governance since the beginning of the 1990s, through an analysis of processes and actors involved in policies and management of urban physical and social infrastructure. The paper will focus on three arguments and trends: (i) the inability of a complex governance framework to improve and to maintain public services, (ii) the new urban regime and coalition that the “Vision Mumbai” reform program of the 2000s unveils, and, (iii) the place of the local government and its relationships with the State government. The main findins are the Mumbai has moved away from a purely public sector command approach to deliver services. Private operators, associational actors and communities all have responsibilities and a say in the decision making processes. Nevertheless, this process seem to have given space for rent seeking and the maintaining of clientelization as against one of the core economic arguments in favour of decentralisation. Second, the recent years display the rise of a new coalition constituted of the State government, the experts, the business houses and the vocal midlle classes movement. This trend is further supported by the new policies put in place at the Central government level. Representatives of marginalised group exist and still have a voice in Mumbai but they are being sidelined in the new decision-making processes. Third, among the main weaknesses of the democratization process appear the question of scale. On the one hand, the ‘localness’ dimension, supposedly taken care of by the ward committees is defeated. On the other hand, the actual scale of reforms, the urban agglomeration, is taken care of by the Mumbai Metropolitation Regional Development Authority, an administrative body with no political representation. This is not in conformity with the 74th consitutional amendment and leaves therefore the upper hand to the State government.

“Delhi in the 1990s-2000s: Good Governance and Bad Governability”
Dr. Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal (Centre for the Study of India and South Asia, CNRS-EHESS, Paris, and CSH)

This paper attempts a qualification of Delhi’s governance since the early 1990s through an analytical description of three major facts: (i) the process of democratic decentralization (through the creation of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, the implementation of the 74th Constitutional Amendment and that of the Bhagidari scheme); (ii) the emphasis, in the discourse of political actors as well as in a series of initiatives, on the notion of “good governance”; and (iii) the bad quality of governability which reached the proportions of an acute crisis over the issue of land use in 2006 .

“Urban governance in Kolkata – the municipalisation Vs metropolisation issue”
Ms. Archana Ghosh (Institute for Social Sciences, Eastern Regional Centre, Kolkata) and Anurima Mukherjee Basu

The present paper is an account of the urban governance system in Kolkata city and how the governance agenda has changes over time.  We discuss about the role of different actors of urban governance in the city and their interrelationship.  The chronology of state level governance initiatives in seventies and eighties in perspective of urban problems faced by the state and the city at that time constitutes the first section of the paper. Several urban reforms started in the 1990s by the state government pursuant to the 74th Constitutional Amendment and more recent reforms in the context of globalization which have a direct impact on urban governance in Kolkata is the content of the second section. The third section presents the Kolkata Municipal Corporation as the actor of urban governance; its structure, functions and finances and the present reforms are the content of this section.  The fourth section presents the concept of participatory governance in the city and the role of Ward Committees, civil society, NGOs and community as actors. The last section concludes the paper with summary and issues.

 

Session II. Urban governance through the prism of primary education

Chair: Prof. Geetha B. Nambissan (Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)
Discussant: Prof. R.Govinda (National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi)

"Exploring the Dynamics of 'Voice' and 'Responsiveness' in Education Services in Delhi“
Dr. Jennifer Jalal (Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)

The ‘Governance’ of education, though an essential social service, has never quite received the same attention as that of some other crucial urban services such as water, electricity, or public transport. However, like the other services, perhaps even more so, there are multiple providers* in this sector. But unlike them, and despite various competitive forces, the mechanism of ‘quality control’ has been and continues to be non-existent. Surprisingly this is not limited to the services provided by the State alone, but seems to cut through most of the other sectors, including the private as well.
What are the reasons for the lack of efficiency and accountability in the system? Even though there has been a huge proliferation of schools, which in some ways can be interpreted as an increase in the ‘choice’ for the consumer, it is perhaps still not enough to put them in a position of power to ‘voice’ their demands for better services.
The State on the other hand has ‘responded’ over the years; however the forms in which it has chosen to respond suggests a process of off-loading its responsibilities in the name of ‘outsourcing; or ‘partnerships’ (which I call the ‘shirking’ rather than ‘shrinking’ role of the state) rather than as a result of democratic policy decisions.
This study explores some of these dynamics which govern the co-relation (if at all) between choice-voice and responsiveness, drawing some examples from the case of education services in Delhi.
* - Some may argue that these are not services of equal calibre and therefore are not to be considered multiples of the same. This issue in itself calls for a larger debate, which is beyond the scope of this present paper.

"Education in Hyderabad and Kolkata. New Actors, Governance and the Politics of Muddling Through“
Dr. Jos Mooij (Institute of Social Studies, The Hague)

While less than one fifth of the Indian population was literate at the time of Independence, two thirds was literate in 2001. Especially the 1990s have witnessed an enormous increase. Public norms about education have also changed, and the need for universal education is no longer challenged. While earlier education was primarily a concern of the upper and middle classes on the one hand and the government as main provider on the other, a number of new actors have become important in the last 1-2 decades. Who are these actors and what has their emergence and increasing importance meant for governance of the educational sector? This question is discussed in the context of two urban centres: Hyderabad and Kolkata. The paper discusses three new main categories of actors: the new users (lower class children and their parents), private schools and corporate non-governmental organisations. The paper then moves on to discuss the way in which these new actors have been incorporated in educational governance. Their emergence and increasing importance demands some adaptation, transformation and democratisation of educational governance, but this, the paper argues, happens only partially and haphazardly.

"Access to Education and Health and the Role of Urban Actors in Kolkata“.
Dr. Basudev Choudhury (University of Caen), Dr. Jayanta Basu (ENGIO, Kolkata) and Ms Trisha Sen Sharma:

Session III. Food and lodging for the urban poor

Chair: Dr. Véronique Dupont (Institute for Research on Development, Paris, and CSH)
Discussant: Prof. Isabelle Milbert (Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Geneva)

“Urban governance through the lens of the PDS: can we compare Hyderabad and Mumbai?”
Dr. Frédéric Landy (University of Nanterre)

It is possible to partly assess the quality of urban governance by a research on the Public Distribution System of subsidized foodstuff supply, though it is usually considered to be a tightly centralized institution exclusively managed by the line department. After a discussion of the term “urban governance”, the first section describes the obstacle course that people in Mumbai and Hyderabad have to undergo for getting access to the PDS: this system is not so “public” because of corruption and the use of ration card as identity proof. The second section argues that the PDS is not a good entry point to study “municipal governance” in spite of the (informal) role of the Corporator in this matter, because the local vigilance committees hardly work.
However, the third section shows that “urban” governance as a whole clearly appears when other actors are analysed: the users and their ambiguous mobilization, the filtering intermediaries who collect bribes, the umbrella role of political parties on community-based organisations that tend to be caste or religion-based, the action of the ONG Ration Kruti Samiti in Mumbai. The fourth section argues that it is necessary to go beyond simple dichotomies opposing State vs. civil society, formal vs. informal actors, political vs. civil society. Since linking capital is to a large extent nothing but the projection of the bonding capital onto the upper level of decision, a “vertical” and segmented urban governance is generated at the cost of urban solidarity and equity at the metropolitan scale. An annex proposes elements for a synthesis of the APUG project.

"Urban governance and slum development in metropolitan cities: the case of Hyderabad.“
Ms Archana Ghosh

This paper tries to present how urban governance affects the agenda of slum development and poverty alleviation. Our case study is the metropolitan city of Hyderabad, which in recent times has undergone massive reforms in all aspects of urban governance. The tenets of good governance through decentralization, transparency, accountability and participation are highly propagated. In order to project the city as the ‘knowledge city’ and clean city to the foreign investors, it is planned to be a slum less city. Therefore, urban reforms include several initiatives and policy guidelines to achieve this goal. The paper examines the policies of slum development and poverty alleviation in the recent years, and identifies different actors and their roles within the new paradigm of interactive urban governance in the city and the impact of their actions on the slums and slum population.

Day Two

Session IV. Primary level healthcare as an indicator of urban governance

Chair: Prof. Srinivas Chary (Administrative Staff College of India, Hyderabad)
Discussant: Prof. Bruno Jobert (Research Centre on The Political, the City and Regional Development , CNRS, Grenoble)

“The Political Economy of Mumbai's Health Governance”
Mr Ravi Duggal ( Centre for Equity into Health and Allied Themes, Mumbai)

Mumbai is not only the largest city in India but also has the longest and continuous stint of experience with local governance. The situation of Mumbai gets complicated with the fact that not only is it the capital of one of the most developed states of the country but it is also historically the financial and industrial capital of India. The consequence of such a scenario is that a plethora of agencies have a stake in the city and this renders local governance difficult because various national interests become linked to the governance of Mumbai.
The Mumbai Municipal Corporation, while being one of the more efficient urban local bodies in the country, does not give evidence of being run in a democratic way, especially in its decision making processes. Democracy stops short at representation and for afew procedural processes. Decision making is highly centralized in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy and the Municipal Commissioner has overriding powers being a state government appointee. In contrast the Mayor who represents the elected community is a mere figurehead.
The paper focuses on the governance and decision making processes of the health department of the BMC. It reviews the state of the public health system, its historical evolution and current policies that favor selective approaches and privatization. Subsequently, based on views of multiple stakeholders gathered from interviews, the paper goes on to critically analyse the decision making processes at different levels of the public health system and concludes that decision making is highly centralized, that the elected representatives play a very limited role, that the providers of healthcare who deal directly with civil society have no say in how the health system functions and that as a consequence of such a structure of governance the public healthcare system is collapsing. The paper suggests that the coming elections offer an opportunity, given the churning within civil society due to various adverse events in the city in the last couple of years, to change the political economy of health governance. The bottom line is that people and their representatives have to take charge and keep the pressure on and not relax after they have done their duty of electing their representatives.

“Urban governance through the prism of primary level health services provision: A study of Delhi.”
Dr Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal

This paper proposes to consider the provision of public primary health services, i.e. a major social infrastructure, as a case study of the changes brought up in urban governance in the past 15 years by economic liberalization, politico-administrative decentralization and the large consensus around the desirability of “good governance”, with a focus on India’s capital city. The paper successively examines the role played by four types of actors as intermediaries between the people and public providers of health services: elected representatives (municipal councillors but also members of the Legislative Assembly), and civil society organisations, consisting essentially of Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) and Non Government Organizations (NGOs). What does the presence of these various categories of intermediaries change in the provision of health services? What do they do, with whom, against whom, for whom?

“A weak link in the chain. Situating the municipality’s contribution in the supply of public health services in Hyderabad”
Dr Loraine Kennedy

In India’s large cities, public healthcare services are provided by different levels of government. Although there is some overlap, each level tends to specialise in particular types of care, e.g., preventive or curative, and to manage particular types of establishments. Generally speaking, local bodies look after primary healthcare centres and preventive health and in that capacity they are in charge of implementing central government schemes. This paper explores the role of the Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad (MCH) in the delivery of healthcare services in the city, and its relationship to other actors and institutions involved in providing services, mainly the state government administration but also international funding agencies, private organisations and NGOs. Placing the research within the wider political context of the state of Andhra Pradesh, one of the objectives is to evaluate the changes that have taken place in the last decade as a result of decentralisation and also economic reforms, which have had direct or indirect consequences on social service delivery. The focus is on the actors involved in the decision-making processes and on delivery systems. Secondly, using both secondary data and primary data generated from fieldwork in two localities in the city, this paper also examines the perspective of the target population with regard to municipal services and analyses household strategies in healthcare. Lastly, the findings are discussed in terms of the implications on urban governance.

Session V. Water, sanitation and solid waste management

Chair: Dr. Sridharan (School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi)
Discussant: Prof. Bernard Barraqué (Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées, Paris)

“From the closet of the developmental State to a liberal interface. Governing water in Delhi between the Multilateral, State, Civil and Private society actors”.
Dr Joël Ruet

A political or a governance regime always vests or is partly determined by economic dynamics. In the case of Delhi, this article shows that the urban governance saw the entry of urban entrepreneurs developing their offer on the demand of the emerging middle class, as well as industries developing water strategies based on more global compulsions. This is all the more to be noted, that the policy-makers of this city, throughout the developmental State sequence, had perceived it as under a regime that was to be politically-driven, non-industrial, wary of urban and demographic growth. From this picture, liberalisation has led the politicians to compose with the industry, and with some of their citizen.

“Access Polarised: Water and Sewerage Provisioning in Kolkata and Hyderabad Cities during Reforms“
Dr Keshab Das (Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, Ahmedabad)

Ensuring sustainable access to basic services in urban India has continued to remain a major challenge for civic bodies. A fast growing urban population has exerted great pressure on the provisioning of these indispensable services. While resource – both physical and financial – inadequacy has been an obvious area of concern, a number of studies, especially during the last decade or so, have underscored possible constraints facing or dysfunctionalities in urban governance. These governance factors seem to determine the equity aspect in access to these services by the local population. With the growing emphasis on the neoliberal tenet of decentralized governance – that could facilitate local level democratic decision-making – the pattern of provisioning of basic services reflects the dynamics of urban governance, ultimately. With this backdrop, this paper discusses the issues in agency and access to such basic services as drinking water and sanitation in two bustling Indian cities of Kolkata and Hyderabad in the east and south, respectively. The empirical core of the comparative study derives upon qualitative and quantitative information as collected from the offices of and inhabitants/popular representatives of regions served by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) and Municipal Corporation of Hyderabad. That the marginalized section of the cities had poorer access to the services was obvious, irrespective of the distinct local political culture as also the manner of urban governance.

“Reforming solid waste management in Mumbai and Hyderabad: Policy convergence, distinctive processes”
Dr Marie-Hélène Zérah

In this paper, we shall study the reforms initiated for solid waste management, and more specifically household garbage collection, a compulsory function of urban local bodies even prior to the decentralization laws. The research is based on a comparative case study of Mumbai and Hyderabad and an empirical survey in three administrative wards of Mumbai and two electoral wards in Hyderabad. First, we analyse a reform process carried out between choice and constraints that leads to new policies, in congruence with the ‘good governance’ agenda of reliance on private sector and people’s participation. Second, the analysis of participation highlights distinctive processes between low-income areas, where people have no say in decision making and affluent residential areas, where civic groups are able to take advantage of the new form of urban governance. Privatisation appears mostly as a stop gap policy to expand work force at a low cost. Third, we focus on an analysis of the transformations of both the administrative machinery and the local government, mainly to highlight the lack of focus given to these two elements by the reform agenda.

Session VI. Financial aspects of urban governance

Chair: Prof. Amitabh Kundu (Centre for the Study of Regional Development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)
Discussant: Prof. Om Mathur (National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, Delhi)

“Deciphering the code of Mumbai budgets”
Prof. Abhay Pethe (University of Mumbai)

The present study critically views the budgets of Mumbai Municipal Corporation for the five preceding years. It does so by keeping in view the points of departure provided by the overarching contextual frame of urban governance and the process of decentralization. Thus, the budgets are viewed temporally in the aggregate as well as in the dis-aggregative modes. The various economically relevant and meaningful variables are scrutinized and ratios and trends computed and commented upon. In doing so the basic purpose of services expected to be provided by the local governments is kept in mind. The basic objective of a budget is studied from the point of view of data consistency and information transparency as well as the underlying intent and delivery. The study draws implications for a major re-haul of the budget making process and presentation so as to facilitate it being used as tool for efficient and accountable operationalization of the functioning of local government (in this case MCGM) as conceived in the 74th Constitutional Amendment.

“ An analysis of the budget of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi”
Mr Anurag Srivastav (Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, Delhi)

"Municipal Finance in Kolkata: Initiatives for Reform“
Mr Debatosh Das Gupta (Kolkata Municipal Corporation)

“The Implementation of the MLA & MP Local Area Development Scheme in Delhi and Kolkata“
Dr Girish Kumar (Indian Institute of Public Administration, Delhi)

Session V. Conclusion and vote of thanks

Concluding remarks
Prof. Jean-Pierre Gaudin (Institute of Political Studies, Aix-en-Provence)

Vote of thanks
Dr Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal