THE MUMBAIKAR: HONOURED TODAY, FORGOTTEN TOMORROW
THE MUMBAIKAR: HONOURED TODAY, FORGOTTEN TOMORROW
Barely 24 hours after the Mumbai bomb blasts, the city had remarkably picked itself up, suggesting defiantly to the terrorists that it would not be cowed down. Although the media didn’t report it, there were many unsung heroes within government - the Western Railways for the alacrity in restoring train service; the police for ensuring law and order; the municipal corporation for their emergency response coordination.
However, the pivotal hero was the Mumbaikar. It's easy to gloss over the courage and the spirit that the Mumbai resident displayed that evening. The footage of rescuers taking survivors out of the shredded trains, lifting them on their shoulders over the platforms or bringing them into hospitals doesn't capture the choice that each individual made when confronted with either moving on with their daily chores - commitments, families, work - or moving towards the bomb blast, not knowing if there were more that would go off. Understanding this viscerally means putting ourselves in the same position and asking what choices we would make. And what we saw was thousands of people making these choices, not out of a rational process of weighing the pros-and-cons, but out of a spontaneous and instinctive sense of civic sense and community. You have to marvel at that awesome display of the power of the people.
And it wasn't just after the bomb blasts. A year ago, on July 26, we saw this during the floods. And every time the city has been caught in a crisis. Each time we praise the spirit of the Mumbaikars, we sing paeans about their civic sense, we photograph them, we honour them.
And then, we forget them. When the city returns to normal, with the day-to-day challenges of urban life - overflowing drains and potholed roads - we deny the same Mumbaikar a role in addressing these issues. The same politicians who garland the common man one day will conveniently forget about him when it comes to the many decisions that need to be made about the city. This is the irony of being a citizen. That you are called upon to bail out the city during its moments of crises, but you are forgotten, banished back to the queues and waiting lines for the remaining time.
Two questions arise. The first is whether the average citizen should have a role, i.e. “Why should citizens participate?” And the second is about the structure of such an involvement, i.e. “How can citizens participate?”
Answering the first question is easy: there are mountains of evidence to prove that the only way to run cities is to decentralise to the lowest common denominator - allow local problems to be solved locally, and bring just the common and more complex problems to headquarters. Mumbai does not have 100,000 problems, it has a hundred problems repeated a thousand times. But decentralisation without accountability will only result in decentralised corruption. This accountability cannot be upward to the municipality, but outward to the citizen. Across the world, citizens in most cities have opportunities to participate in decision-making - on city plans, land use and zoning, building bylaws, public schooling, garbage disposal and a variety of such issues. If we needed additional evidence, we need to look no further than our own villages: our Panchayati Raj Act is a remarkable piece of legislation that provides precisely this kind of decentralised structure, with every rural voter being a member of a Grama Sabha. Unfortunately, in India, the urban voter is still a second-class citizen. It’s time to correct this. The “why” of citizen participation is impossible to deny.
This gets to the second question, the “how” of participation. Just making the moral and efficiency argument for participation does not mean that we will get the architecture right – ensuring that hundreds of thousands of citizens can actually meaningfully engage in civic affairs without creating cacophony. This requires carefully structured mechanisms that are detailed in a manner that allows every citizen the opportunity to engage at the level at which she chooses - neighbourhood, ward or the city as a whole. And this needs to be integrated into the political structure of the city government. It sounds daunting, almost impossible to do.
The good news is that it has been designed, it can be done, and it is now almost inevitable. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) is the largest urban initiative in the country, with Rs 50,000 crores of central government assistance for cities, with reform conditions. One key reform is the passage of a law for citizen participation. Under this law, every registered voter of a polling booth will be a member of an Area Sabha, every Area Sabha will send a Representative to a Ward Committee, and every Ward will be represented by its councillor. With this, citizens would finally have the opportunity to engage on local issues at their local level - not in informal communities that can be disregarded by the municipality, but through formal platforms called Area Sabhas. Now, local issues like garbage and drains and water supply can finally be debated and resolved in the Area Sabhas. All state governments – including Maharashtra - will have to modify their Municipalities Acts to make room for Area Sabhas and Ward Committees.
Whether Maharashtra undertakes this reform with the rigour and the detail that is necessary for it to succeed is still an open question. One thing is for sure - if they do it right, they will permanently recognise the Mumbaikar for the constructive role they always play in shaping the city. And if they want to turn citizens into cynics, they can resort to the games they know best – honour the Mumbaikar today to forget about them tomorrow.
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The author is founder of Janaagraha. He can be reached at ramesh@janaagraha.org