CITY’S SAKE

BJP’S new municipal councillors in Delhi and the Aap-run government must learn to work together

IN JUNE 2015, about four months after he took over as Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal promised to make the city “world-class”. In October that year, sanitation workers in the city went on strike. As heaps of garbage lay unattended, the National Green Tribunal Court asked the city’s government to extend support to the civic bodies. In the next year and a half, Delhi witnessed four more strikes by sanitation workers. During each of these episodes, the Aap-run Delhi government and the Bjpdominated municipalities traded charges. The agencies became theatres for the BJP-AAP political rivalry that has marred efforts to deal with almost every civic crisis in the national capital — be it the chikungunya-dengue outbreak last year or Delhi’s pollution crisis or its garbage problem. With the electorate again giving the BJP control over the city’s municipalities for the next five years, the Delhi government and the local bodies will continue to be run by two different parties. They owe it to the city to stop bickering and pay attention to civic governance.

Coming barely a month after the BJP’S sweeping victory in elections in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, the Delhi municipal elections assumed national importance. But national politics overtaking local issues does not augur well for a country where 40 per cent of the population is expected to live in urban areas by 2030. It’s true that sanitation, garbage management, housing and pollution are common problems of Indian cities, but civic governance also requires meticulous attention to local dynamics. For instance, dealing with pollution in Mumbai, which is close to the sea, would be a different proposition compared to confronting the problem in landlocked Delhi, where toxic smoke from straw burning in the neighbouring states during the harvesting seasons aggravates an already hazardous smog. At the same time, municipalities can also learn from common problems. Mumbai and Delhi could learn from Pune and Bengaluru, where local bodies have found ways to integrate resident welfare organisations into their waste management programmes. But when state governments and municipalities are engaged in daily slugfests, requiring local bodies to be inventive is asking for too much. Most municipalities today remain dependent on state governments for finances. For example, one of the grouses of the Delhi municipalities — among the country’s richest — has been that the city government did not release the funds to pay sanitation workers.

The BJP’S team in Delhi’s municipalities is entirely new — an acknowledgement by the party of the underperformance of its previous representatives. The Aap-run Delhi government must also shed the baggage of a bitter past. Otherwise, the term “worldclass city” will remain an empty catchword.