URBANISATION in India is accelerating, with millions of inhabitants migrating from rural to urban areas for better job opportunities, income prospects, and wealth creation. According to the Economic Survey 2024, the country’s urban population is estimated to reach 600 million by 2031 and 800 million by 2050. However, rapid urban growth and ill-prepared municipal governance pose significant challenges, including inadequate infrastructure, detrimental sustainable development, socioeconomic disparities, and housing shortages, resulting in socially, economically, and environmentally unsustainable situations.
While the Centre has come up with several schemes such as Swachh Bharat Mission, AMRUT and Smart Cities Mission in the past decade to improve civic services in cities and strengthen urban planning and governance, need was felt to address urbanisation challenges by introducing changes in the political and administrative setup. To address some of these challenges, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, on the directions the Prime Minister’s Office, has constituted five working groups to strengthen urban governance in cities.
In its order, the ministry said: “There was inadequate focus on initiating structural reforms in urban governance that requires systemic changes in the existing structure of city governance. Therefore, it is imperative to focus on achieving sustainable and incremental governance reforms that would bring changes in the structure and power of city government.” The working groups will examine five key areas: reforms at political level, administrative reforms, redefining the role of parastatal organisations, transition systems for rural-urban continuum, and capacity building at local level.
The groups will submit a report that will recommend models for a municipal Act, recruitment rules, human resource policy, and framework for transition system for rural-urban continuum, among others, within three months. Over the years, the number of statutory towns has increased from 4,000 to over around 5,000. A statutory town is one that is legally defined as urban and has a municipality, corporation, a cantonment board or a notified town area committee. Experts say that there is a need to develop a framework for planned development of periurban areas for swift transition from rural to urban, and that the current city governance system needs to be relooked at.
One of the key deliverables of the working groups is to recommend a model municipal Act by examining the possibility of redefining the role and responsibility of the Mayor and elected representatives. The present municipal Acts in states provide administrative power to executive functionaries (bureaucrats) and involve a limited role of Mayors. Apart from empowering Mayors, the Government is also looking at increasing the role of Councillors in decision-making, and improving citizen participation in area development and budget preparation, among others.
Reforms in the city governance system are needed to harness the power of urbanisation and reimagine the cities. The Centre is exploring the possibility of reforms at the political level to empower the city Mayor by redefining their roles and responsibilities, the selection process (direct election or through selection) and also ensuring a fixed tenure for stability in governance. In most corporations, Mayors don’t have powers because most of the functions are handled by parastatal agencies or state governments. India needs an institutional mechanism wherein the Mayor and the Councillor have the power to approve or veto proposals of other agencies.
