Governing Locally: Institutions, Policies and Implementation in Indian Cities by Babu Jacob and Suraj Jacob, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, New Delhi and Singapore: Cambridge University Press, 2021; pp xxv + 293, $110 (hardback).
The introduction of directly elected mayors has the potential to completely change not only the landscape of urban local body governance, but also the nature of citizens’ participation in the management of their cities. The benefits of the directly elected mayoral system and its influence on the dynamics of the existing political system are explored.
In the wake of the global enthusiasm for smart cities, the central government launched the ambitious Smart Cities Mission in 2015. Based on a detailed analysis of proposals of the top 60 cities, the mission is located within the larger urban reform process initiated in the 1990s. An attempt has been made to define smart cities to understand how they envisage questions of urban transformations, inclusion and democracy. The proposals reveal an excessive reliance on consultants, lack of effective participation, a common set of interventions that are accepted as “smart solutions,” and a shift towards greater control of urban local bodies by state governments.
The right to the city means more than just access to its resources. It suggests that people, particularly the marginalised, not only have the right to inhabit a city, but also the right to design, reshape and transform it. An analysis of urban governance in our country keeping in mind this overlooked human right.
New forms of urban organisation with private modes of governance are being unleashed across India through the creation of special economic zones, industrial townships and smart cities. This paper aims to bring a grounded understanding of the emergence of such spaces by examining the transformation of the governance systems in Electronics City in peri-urban Bengaluru with the constitution of the Electronics City Industrial Township Authority. Even though ELCITA is not a democratically elected body, it is vested with the powers of a municipality, including the power to levy property tax and perform municipal functions. Such an institution could be created because of an exception provided for industrial townships under the 74th constitutional amendment. New urban regimes like ELCITA are created to bypass the social and political realities of Indian cities. Does this represent a new regime of governance that questions some of the basic premises of state authority in a democracy?
