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Unpacking Local Self-Government: The Uncertain Power of Cities in the Indian Constitution
Abstract
While cities are increasingly becoming powerful economic and political units, legal scholars have paid inadequate attention to the role of local governments in the constitutional division of powers. This paper examines the legal authority of city governments in India’s constitutional architecture and analyses the nature and extent of powers exercised by them. While globally city governments seldom derive their powers directly from the Constitution, in India the passage of the 74th Amendment has ensured that they have a definite space in its Constitution. Despite constitutional entrenchment, urban local governments in India find themselves powerless to administer some of the core municipal functions including urban planning. This paper seeks to analyse the reasons behind this contradiction. It argues that city governments continue to be weak because of the inherent limitations of the scope of the 74th Amendment as well as the way in which it is translated and implemented by the states. It examines the constitutional authority of urban local governments by analysing the key provisions of the 74th Amendment and its judicial interpretations. To understand how the constitutional reform has translated on the ground, this paper closely examines the role and functioning of the city government of Bangalore.
... Drawing from his study on grassroots democracy in rural India, Datta (2019) posits that deliberative processes are "a contrivance of human wisdom rooted in the belief that the involvement of citizens in the process of decision-making makes development more demand-driven and target-grouporiented and governance more inclusive". The existing institutional framework, particularly through the decentralization reforms under the 73 rd Amendment to the Indian constitution, opens multiple modes for civic participation through the Grama Sabhas 8 (Idiculla 2020). What is lacking are mechanisms for iterative engagement, as one-off consultations are not sufficient. ...
Landscape governance challenges, particularly in peri-urban contexts like the Bannerghatta National Park (BNP) region in South India, exemplify ‘wicked’ problems due to their inherent complexities. These challenges arise from a mix of conflicting interests, policy ambiguities, and sociocultural dynamics, which often blur the definition of problems and hinder effective solutions. Despite apparent options for resolution, stakeholder disagreements and deep uncertainties about implementation strategies complicate governance. This study, therefore, has two broad objectives. The first objective is to analyze the local discourses surrounding planned policy interventions around the BNP region in South India. Based on the findings, the second objective is to draw insights for sustainable natural resource governance research and practice. We applied Q-methodology to understand the discourses that underpin various conflicts in the rapidly urbanizing elephant corridor at BNP. We elicited information on how various local actors frame solutions to current collective action challenges in the BNP landscape and their perspectives on the proposed eco-sensitive zone notification, as well as the functioning of current policy interventions concerning conservation and development. The study uncovers the micropolitics and power regimes underpinning various natural resource governance challenges and demonstrates the utility of the Q-methodology in bringing diverse perspectives together in response to ‘wicked’ governance challenges.
... Moreover, despite legislative provisions for decentralisation, urban schemes at the federal level, such as the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission and Smart Cities, and policies, such as the national Metro Rail Policy, have further centralised transport planning and decision making (Idiculla, 2020). Such schemes have systematically empowered Union and state governments to produce overarching legislation that bypasses ULBs (Jamwal, 2006). ...
Background and objectives
Cities in the Global South are simultaneously witnessing wide-scale population ageing and rapid urbanisation. There is overwhelming pressure on policy makers to rapidly envision and provision age-friendly transport environments. In Indian cities, later-age mobilities face unique risks due to traffic congestion and inequities. However, the policy and transport research has treated congestion, equity and age-friendly mobilities as unrelated issues. This article goes a step ahead to understand how the policies to mitigate congestion can impact the provisioning of age-friendly infrastructure.
Research design and methods
Bengaluru, once termed the ‘pensioners’ paradise’, is known for its ‘alarming’ levels of traffic congestion (Pucher et al, 2005; Pojani and Stead, 2017). We review Bengaluru’s transport policies and peer-reviewed articles concerning these policies to understand the positioning of age-friendly transport within this context.
Results
Our findings recognise a shift from sufficientarianism to utilitarian orientations in Bengaluru’s policy making on easing congestion, which narrows the options for later-age transport users in terms of access and affordability. Some of the features not unique to Bengaluru – such as top-down planning, institutional fragmentation and distancing of users from policy making – have resulted in buses being inaccessible for passengers with mobility issues, metro rail being unaffordable for those on low incomes, lack of safe modes of transport and safe access to streets.
Discussion and implications
The article is an initial foray into the ambiguity in the philosophical underpinning of transport policy making, which prioritises solving congestion ahead of providing age-friendly transport. We highlight specific challenges the cities of the Global South experience as they envision age-friendly transport policies amid the ascendance of congestion-solving policies.
... In Indian cities, as in many others, the decentralization of power to urban local governments remains incomplete, despite the implementation of national decentralization legislation in the 1990s and considerable pressure from civil society groups (Das & Chattopadhyay, 2018;Idiculla, 2020). At the same time, we witness the proliferation of hybrid modalities of governing where state power is being concentrated in non-elected entities, an array of (circulating) consultants who use new technologies of governance and have become central to government functioning, and an increasing blurring of the boundaries between public and private and formal and informal (Chattopadhyay, 2017;Gibson et al., 2022). ...
Diana Mitlin assesses the contributions of reform coalitions for more inclusive and equitable urban outcomes. This commentary examines three aspects of Mitlin’s arguments. First, it elaborates on the nature of knowledge that coalitions catalyse, suggesting that this could contribute to building a theory of practice on coalitions and city-making. Second, it examines the nature of the transformations coalitions seek to achieve emphasizing the generation of a transformative politics that seeks to democratize governance systems rather than one focused solely on material outcomes. Third, it interrogates the structural limits of what coalitions can achieve in the contemporary moment. The commentary draws from the author’s own experience of Indian cities.
This article focuses on the place of local governance in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indian cities. It situates pandemic governance in the evolving debates around decentralisation and its various strands, such as participative governance, service delivery, institutional capacity and performance, proximity of institutions and representatives, and representative democracy. The pandemic was a crisis that placed multiple governance and service delivery challenges on the state. Local governments had to innovate and deliver on multiple fronts in a highly uncertain and challenging context. To what extent were these innovations linked to the past trajectories of local governance? What happened to these innovations after the pandemic? On the basis of case studies of two highly diverse cities, the article argues that pandemic governance was circumscribed by the past trajectories of local governance. Further, it seeks to ask whether the pandemic contributed to an awareness of the need for democratic decentralisation or whether it intensified ongoing trends towards de-democratisation.
Scholarly enquiries into federalism have paid insufficient attention to the role of local governments in the constitutional orders of jurisdictions in the global south. However, it is precisely in the “new world” constitutional orders in Asia, Latin America and Africa which are witnessing “constitutional innovations” for local governance. With the passing of the 73rd and 74th Amendments, the Constitution of India now integrates rural and urban local governments as “institutions of self-government” within India’s state architecture. However, despite constitutional entrenchment, local governments in India are often weak and have limited autonomy in executing functions vested in them. This paper examines the role, status, and power of local governments in India’s federal constitutional scheme and their relationship with state and federal governments. It critically analyses the nature of authority the Constitution of India vests on local governments, and how these have been translated by state governments, interpreted by courts, and exercised in practice. The paper explores the underlying legal and political reasons behind the wide gulf between the de jure and de facto powers of local governments, especially in cities, in India. For a situated understanding of the inter-governmental relations of local governments with higher levels of government, this paper focuses on the division of powers in the governance of public health, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Public health is a particularly interesting lens to understand inter-governmental relations since the legislative and executive authority for governing public health is split between different levels of government. Though in India’s constitutional scheme, state and local governments are the primary authorities vested with the management of healthcare, the federal government invoked the Disaster Management Act, 2005 for the imposition of a national lockdown. The judicial review of pandemic-related governance has also had a significant impact on inter-governmental relations that has altered the vaccination strategy of the federal government. Through a close analysis of the constitutional text, judicial interpretation and political context determining local government power, specifically in the context of governing public health, this paper seeks to elucidate the role of local governments in Indian federalism.
A global pandemic has brought renewed attention to an old question: what do we owe each other? Calls to engage in thinking about a ‘new social contract’ have emerged rooted both in an intimate memory of crisis as well as in the possibilities rooted in relief work, mutual aid and stimulus packages. Scholars have sought to learn, for example, what relief measures could teach us about social protection in a ‘post-pandemic’ world, even while cautioning that socio-economic inequalities were only revealed rather than caused by the pandemic. Drawing on a set of empirical cases collectively produced by researchers (including this author) at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, this article turns to a specific part of any social contract: the design and operation of social protection systems. Within this, it argues that operational modes of delivering social protection need specific attention within scholarly debates, especially in their complexities within the spatial and economic informality that marks cities of the global south. Put simply: how we deliver both existing and new entitlements is as important as deciding what entitlements urban residents should be entitled to. I offer four main operational concerns that mark the delivery of social protection to informal workers in urban India: (a) residence as an operational barrier; (b) workplaces as sites of delivery; (c) working with worker organisations as delivery infrastructures; and (d) building systems of recognition and registration of informal workers.
The city of Bangalore sprawls over 741 sq.mt and is likely to grow consistently in the coming decades with approximately 100 million USD in investments committed in 2022. With climate changes and post Pandemic regulations- the city of 13 Million people is facing a challenging situation where the quality of life-particularly health, needs to be balanced for all its residents. uses Case Study method to understand- the diverse parameters defining the role of City Improvement This paper aims to examine the role and scope of the City's Improvement Trust in shaping its salutogenic character. This paper reviews the framework from which the Trust derives authority, the models of operation, its criticism from the public domain, and its ability to meet future challenges. This research Trust, its limitations, and to develop a matrix for the same. The paper concludes with guidelines for the future of such bodies in metropolitan Indian cities.
This article explores the spatialization of financial capitalism through an examination of the private governance of Gurgaon, Haryana, India, a city which has become something of an emblem of neoliberal real estate development. Gurgaon illustrates the processes through which financialized values, rationalities, and culture permeate urban governance and reshape urban space. The way that capital lands in Gurgaon—what is built, for whom, and how populations are both shaped and shape themselves around it—demonstrates what happens when the rationalities of finance govern urban spaces. The primary argument here is that Gurgaon demonstrates the ‘private acting like the public’—meaning, a private actor assuming the governance responsibilities of public actors while executing those responsibilities in the interest of finance. This form of governance includes the following dimensions: the assumption of the duties of local government by private actors such as real estate developers; the transformation of the built environment to both reflect the desires of investors and to include only certain populations; and a form of self-governance whereby the population takes it upon itself to transform in the reflection of financial values and financialized lifestyles. In short, governance power is delegated to private actors—here, real estate developers and investors—and the eventual result is the use of land and a social order that benefits financial instruments and investment. Crucially, though, Gurgaon’s experience also illustrates that this ‘permeation’ is a constant process and is not as simple as financialization landing and local government and geography receiving it. Local government and geographies shape financialization at the same time that their land and resources are financialized into globally traded assets.
This chapter builds upon the increased importance that cities have acquired in recent years. To this end, cities can be seen as the engines of development, innovation, cultural and social interaction, expressing the tensions between diversity and social cohesion. Being places of conflict and innovation, of solidarity and cohabitation of diverse people, cities are faced with unique challenges. Yet, they remain largely neglected as autonomous subjects in constitutional law and federalism theory. In proposing a definition of cities as unique socio-economic and political spaces, strategic for building new modes of governance and reconcile diversity and social cohesion, the chapter invites a more substantive reflection on the role and place of cities in constitutional law, and sketches a preliminary normative agenda for future constitutional reforms in this sense.
The word subsidiarity derives from subsidiary, which in turn has its roots in the Latin word subsidium. In simple words, subsidiarity means the same as assistance or help. As a principle of social philosophy, however, subsidiarity is among the most characteristic directives of the Catholic Church’s social doctrine. It has been present since the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII and it was enunciated by Pope Pius XI in 1931 as a central principle of social theory. In Quadragesimo Anno the Sumo Pontiff outlined the principle of subsidiarity as follows:
In a parliamentary system of government, urban and rural local bodies derive their powers, functions and responsibilities from the sate government legislations. This concept of a local self-government, or rather, local government, paves the way for a proper delineation of functions and powers of the latter, for the smooth flow of funds from state governments and also ensure community involvement in activities. It will thus help strengthen local bodies at the lowest level, rejuvenating a system that has lain dormant for two centuries.
American cities today do not have the power to solve their current problems or to control their future development. Their impotence is expressed in their legal status. Under current law, cities have no “natural” or “inherent” power to do anything simply because they decide to do it. Cities have only those powers delegated to them by state government, and traditionally those delegated powers have been rigorously limited by judicial interpretation. Moreover, city authority exercised pursuant to unquestionably delegated powers is itself subject to absolute state control. In an attempt to curb this unrestrained power, most state constitutions have been amended to grant cities “home rule,” but local self-determination free of state control is still limited, even in those jurisdictions, to matters “purely local” in nature. These days, little, if anything, is sufficiently ”local” to fall within such a definition of autonomy. State law, in short, treats cities as mere “creatures of the state.”.
- Richard Briffault
Richard Briffault, Our Localism: Part II--Localism and Legal Theory, Columbia Law Review 90
(1990), p. 346.
The Transformation of Governance in 'India's Silicon Valley
- Mathew Idiculla
Mathew Idiculla, The Transformation of Governance in 'India's Silicon Valley', Seminar 694
(2017), p. 17.