No harm in the city experimenting with a different administrative model
The Mayor of London was in town recently and he liked what he saw. He had come with a genuine desire to forge business and cultural links with Mumbai. So London put on a glitzy show to impress Mumbai, not just in song and dance (with London women dancing to Kajra Re in front of the Bachchan family, which takes some courage!) but also in terms of policy matters.
Ken Livingstone argued strongly for a Mayoral model where he was the sole person in charge regarding policy matters and did not have to manipulate legislative majorities to get his way. Indeed, as a Londoner, I can vouch that adopting the American style mayoral model for London has been incredibly effective. London has a single planning authority for transport and infrastructure and relations with other cities.
Yet his Mumbai hosts were not convinced by the Livingstone argument. The Municipal Commissioner proudly argued that his post was a statutory one, not subject to legislative control.
He was a good enough substitute for a single powerful mayor. He also argued, as did the Maharashtra Governor SM Krishna, that Mumbaikars had shown tremendous resilience both when the monsoon flooded the city (much better than New Orleans and Katrina) and when the terrorists blasted the trains. Mumbai with its municipality and MMRDC and, of course, the Maharashtra government, was fine, thank you.
There was some dissent from the private sector speakers. Someone even mentioned that Delhi was a state in its own right but no one had demanded that for Mumbai. I felt very old at that moment since the idea that Bombay should be a city state was one of the options considered at the time of States Reorganisation in the 1950s.
Nehru hated the idea of breaking up the old Bombay state into Gujarat and Maharashtra and desperately said perhaps at least Bombay should be a city state.
But the cry of Mumbai Saha Sanyukta Maharashtra Zalach Pahije won the day and Bombay became capital of Maharashtra. I am one of those along with my friend Dilip Chitre who thought in the monsoon of 2005 that the plight of Mumbai showed the resourcefulness of Mumbaikars but also the sore neglect the city had suffered from the powers that be.
Mumbaikars had to show courage because their drains were blocked, because their municipal authority was much too busy politicking and profiting from land scams. Same again about the attack on trains.
When I was a teenager in Bombay, just before it became capital of Maharashtra, it was a superbly functioning and multi-lingual, multi-cultural city. It remains multi-lingual and multi-cultural but it has lost something of its cosmopolitan political culture. It may be too late to reverse that but Mumbai can still manage with a sharp display of will to regain its place as one of the best metropolises of the world.
The delays in infrastructure projects such as the Bandra-Worli bridge, the absence of an metro rail (even Delhi has one now) and the desperate need for renewing the rolling stock on the trains as seen in the shiny but few new trains compared to the old warhorses tells me that it is time Mumbaikars asked themselves whether they are well served by their political arrangements.
The Percy Mistry Report has outlined the challenge facing the city if it is to get to a stage comparable to Shanghai or Singapore. There is a need to think outside the box and ask whether there could be a better command structure in the city. Are there too many overlapping authorities with no clear line of command? Should it be an autonomous region of Maharashtra with an independent budget and revenue source as South Tyrol is in Italy? Or will it be enough for it to have a Mayor with the sort of powers that Livingstone has in London?
Politics especially at a city level is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians alone. Mumbai’s business and cultural leadership should brainstorm about the urgent issue of Mumbai’s governance.
Why must we praise the resilience of Mumbaikars as it only demonstrates the sheer lack of basic amenities they suffer from? Bombay did once have great Mayors. Just look at Pherozeshah Mehta staring at the passers-by outside the Municipal building — a superb piece of Victorian Gothic architecture not matched by many buildings since.
Resilience is fine but it is not enough. Mumbaikars should insist on excellence.
The writer is an economist.
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