Living with urban chaos

Nirmal Sandhu    

THE battle for control of municipalities in Punjab has turned ugly which is not surprising. The Akalis held the State to ransom just because a handful of party candidates could not, or were not allowed to, file nominations. They forgot that worse things had happened during such elections when they were in power. Earlier Congressmen were at the receiving end, now Akalis are. The incidents that provoked the Akali outrage were too small to warrant a disruption of normal life.

Quite surprising was Capt Amarinder Singh’s bravado in the post-dharna play of politics. If supplies of essentials for jawans on the border were held up, military convoys could not move or devotees were prevented from visiting the Golden Temple, he as Chief Minister should own responsibility for the government failure to swiftly remove the unauthorised road blockades rather than pass the blame on to the Akali protesters, who, no doubt, displayed characteristic insensitivity towards public inconvenience. The government moved only after the High Court intervened.   

Akali overreaction happened as Sukhbir Badal got himself needlessly worked up. He was mocked on social media for his arrogant remark made as Deputy Chief Minister about the then protesters that “those who are unwanted at home are out on the road to stage dharnas”. Now himself out on the road, he was a subject of justifiable ridicule.

Representatives of political parties contesting the municipal elections are, once again, talking of fixing roads, sewerage and waste disposal. They had said the same things in the last election and in the election before that and would say it again in the next. Things have not changed, except for the worse, since the pressure of chaotic traffic, encroachments and rural immigration and the consequent burden on civic amenities has kept growing. The quality of life in cities has deteriorated. Largely those responsible for letting cities become unlivable or their wives are in the fray.  

When people’s please-all representatives refuse to take hard decisions — be it the removal of road/rail blockades, the worsening quality of air and drinking water or illegal encroachments — it is the courts people turn to. Governance is sacrificed to accommodate vested interests. Illegal, unplanned housing colonies are regularised and municipalities forced to find and fund ways of laying sewerage, water taps and roads. Haphazard growth of cities is the all too familiar consequence.

Having little to offer from a bankrupt treasury, the Chief Minister presented the electorate paper projects — a vision document for urban development. It is good, no doubt, to have some agenda for action, but what needs to be done to clear the urban mess across the country is widely known. What Capt Amarinder Singh left unsaid was how much his cash-starved government would contribute to the cash-starved local bodies. 

The Congress leadership could have used the party ticket to rope in distinguished citizens and experts leading a retired life in towns and cities for lifting the level of municipal governance. For that you need the courage to disregard the demands of party loyalists. Unsurprisingly, the Congress ticket has gone largely to town-level flag carriers nursing State-level ambitions. Worse, citing his own example, the Chief Minister has justified the ticket to relatives of party leaders.

There is merit in the suggestion that civic elections be depoliticised in the interest of violence-free elections and non-discriminatory grassroots-level development. A system could be involved in which those showing results at the village, tehsil or city levels could be picked up for a bigger role at the State level. But that is too much to expect from the existing political families which keep intact their hold on the power structure by distributing patronage to their errand boys.

Punjab does not have a single city that can be cited as a model outside the State. A 21-city survey conducted by the Bengaluru-based Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy earlier this year ranked cities on various urban governance parameters. Expectedly, none of the cities in Punjab, as also in Haryana and Himachal Pradesh, figured in the top 10 list, not even Chandigarh. At number one was Thiruvananthapuram followed by Pune and Kolkata. 

The municipal mess is an outcome of Punjab’s over-all deterioration, which is a result of poor governance, extravagance and populist politics. The State lacks contrarian leaders with an alternative vision for development who could tell the Badals and the Amarinders the side-effects of politics of freebies, including the pile-up of government debt. In the absence of a system of checks and balances, politicians do whatever it takes to gain power. 

Answerable to none, the Badals did not just starve towns and cities of funds but even diverted Central allocations for projects such as the Smart City, Swachh Bharat and AMRUT (Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation). “Yes men” around them at the State, city and village levels ask no questions, raise no doubts. No one resists any policy, no matter how disastrous. Even the BJP leaders, who have an urban vote base, did not object as Chief Minister Badal hijacked State funds to nurse his parivar constituencies. 

Official reports admit 85 per cent of the Central funds for these crucial projects were misdirected. The Centre, for instance, gave Rs 200 crore for the Ludhiana Smart City project but only Rs 32 crore was released. The Centre responded by denying funds for the Amritsar and Jalandhar Smart City projects. Since the Badal government did not make matching contributions as required under the terms and conditions, the State did not get what was its due. 

Had these projects materialised, there would have been some job creation, some improvement in the living conditions in the cities. These are issues that no party campaign has touched. The present dispensation has made a lot of promises with financial implications which would eat up much of the State revenue in the next few years. There is little hope for things to turn around — in villages as well as cities.

A gloomier future awaits urban Punjab. The Centre threatens to penalise non-performance. It proposes to offer incentives and disincentives on project/scheme execution. Cities will be judged on a livability index and those failing to show results would be denied additional funds. With the State already making heavy financial demands on the Centre, it seems unlikely that the BJP leadership in Delhi would bail out a Congress-ruled State when it had refused funds to a coalition of its own party.

nirmalssandhu@gmail.com