Better representation can help improve our cities
As people move from rural to urban areas, there must be redrawing of constituencies based on the Census
Although Indian history includes some of the earliest cities settled by humans, in our imagination of post-Independence India, the city was an after-thought. Instead, what we did think about, as we began our new free lives, were the Centre and the states, and vast documents were penned to articulate and empower these. Local governance was for another time. That time arrived in the early 1990s. The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act envisaged three new directions for the future of cities.
First, the planning of cities would be statutory and regional, encompassing the full spectrum of social and economic development goals that are vital to urban areas. Second, urban local bodies (ULBs) would be strengthened, and an increasing number of functions were to be transferred from state governments to the ULBs. And third, public participation in the governance of cities was to be strengthened through the formation of empowered ward committees of citizens themselves. The majority of these goals have remained on paper, even two decades later. State legislators and governments have resisted the transfer of functions and powers to local bodies. And citizens’ participation in decision-making remains weak. Even the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission failed to change this . The Smart Cities mission, its successor, doesn’t bother with even the pretence of the law with the Centre virtually directing the cities.
Some of this could have been avoided if we had more politicians elected to assemblies and Parliament from the urban areas. As people move from villages to cities, so too should their votes, and we should see more people elected from urban areas. The Constitution created a mechanism for this through redistribution of seats based on decadal Census. But the state and central politicians have instead managed to ensure that such redistribution has happened only once since the 1970s, after the 2001 Census. Moreover, the current law is that this imbalance will remain until at least 2026. People may be voting with their feet in great numbers each decade, but representation in legislatures is slow to reflect this. In major states, the legislatures are 15-25% over-representative of rural areas. Karnataka, for instance, would have 35 more urban representatives if the constituencies to the legislature were based on 2011 Census, and the number would rise to 45 by 2021. The way to fix this is to bring back decadal revision of electoral boundaries based on each Census. Until that happens, urban problem-solving will receive less than the attention it needs.
Ashwin Mahesh is an urbanist based in Bengaluru, and heads the social technology lab, Mapunity. The views expressed are personal