Municipal Governance :

This is in response to the article by Abhay Pethe, Sahil Gandhi and Vaidehi Tandel (“Assessing the Mumbai Metro politan Region: A Governance Perspective”, EPW, 25 June 2011). The authors are making an observation on the current nature of relations between service delivery governmental organisations in Greater Mumbai. In their view the current approach of organisational coordination is of “institutional polycentricism”. They go on to prescribe this as a d esirable model for the governance of Mumbai.

This is in response to the article by Abhay Pethe, Sahil Gandhi and Vaidehi Tandel (“Assessing the Mumbai Metro politan Region: A Governance Perspective”, EPW, 25 June 2011). The authors are making an observation on the current nature of relations between service delivery governmental organisations in Greater Mumbai. In their view the current approach of organisational coordination is of “institutional polycentricism”. They go on to prescribe this as a d esirable model for the governance of Mumbai. Using this framework, the authors explore one dyad relation between two organi sations – the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Autho rity (MMRDA).

I would argue that the current form of government organisational arrangements appears to be of a network type. Further, that the government organisational identities and their relations have been historically created to maintain the excessive control needs of the state government. So although by law it is the urban local body, or the MCGM in this case, which ought to be the central node of the governmental network within the boundaries of Greater Mumbai, what we ﬁnd is that the state government’s strengthening of MMRDA has resulted in a bipolar nodal network formation.