Why quality of life in Mumbai is poor

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report stated that Mumbai, India's financial hub, is likely to witness a significant jump in economic growth along with other emerging markets and make it to the league of the world's wealthiest cities by 2025.

The report further states that in the league table of the world's great cities Mumbai will rise from it's present rank of 29th to 11th in 2025.

There is little doubt that most Mumbaikars will scoff at this report, and a gullible few may actually celebrate these finds.

But the fact remains that 'quality of life in Mumbai is poor'. A state that, unfortunately, no stakeholder of the city - citizens (rich or poor), urban administrators, elected representatives, media, corporate leaders or civil society organisations - will disagree with.

In a report titled 'Governance in the Mumbai metropolitan region', and compiled for Bombay First, Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy delves deep into the problems that plague the metropolis.

The unanimity in opinion that all is not hunky-dory with Mumbai is based primarily on two sets of perceptions:

The first is the visible evidence of poor quality of urban life, both in absolute terms as well as when compared to other cities around the world.

And the second set of perceptions arise out of transactional experiences:

• A trader looking to get a license or permit to establish a business;
• A citizen seeking to pay his property taxes; 
• A widow attempting to get a promised pension allowance for her deceased husband;
• A community association wishing to participate in the choice of municipal priorities in their neighbourhood;
• A multinational organisation seeking to find clean title land to invest in the city; and 
• An irate resident seeking to complain about a broken water pipe.

These transactional challenges also exist for people within the government:

• Junior clerks in the accounts department;
• Executive engineers in the works department;
• IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officers in so-called decision-making roles within the municipality, but with minimal control over the actual decision-making outcomes;
• Ward corporators who have little control over even their ward budgets, let alone on decisons over the larger city-wide infrastructure;
• A water utility provider who is constantly being pressed to serve more and more citizens in far-flung areas, with broken distribution systems and minimal pricing discretion.

Seeking solutions at an operational level
One way of thinking of such operational challenges is as at the interface between citizens and their local governments, in this case, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Essentially, there are six different categories of citizen interface with their local government:

• Payment of taxes
• Payment of user charges in return for service benefits
• Procurement of licenses and permits
• Access to social welfare benefits
• Redressal of grievances
• Participation in the decision-making process

There are enormous gaps in ensuring that these interfaces are running smoothly, to the satisfaction of the citizens.  These gaps can be thought of as having two perspectives: that of citizens and that of those within the government:

Citizen perspective

From a citizen's perspective, some of the reasons for these operational gaps are:

• Structures of government
• Procedures of government

Government perspective:

• Accountability of officers
• Transparency in the system
• Over-centralisation of enforcement

Addressing these gaps in the day-to-day interfaces that citizens have with government can go a long way in relieving the operational conflicts that confront both citizens and those within the government.

While many of the operational challenges can be solved by looking at Mumbai's quality of life in purely tactical terms - i.e. improving interactions/awareness/simplifying administrative procedures etc, there is merit to the argument that even these changes will not address the larger issues that confront urban quality of life in the city region.

The case for urban governance

The operative term needs to move from 'managing' Mumbai to 'governing' Mumbai, because this not only encompasses the function of managing but also locates it in a larger context.

The problems of urban governance in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region are not trivial. There are technical issues, such as urban planning, design and management of mass transport systems, and access to such resources as water and power along with their pricing and distribution.

There are public finance issues of ensuring that the local bodies in the region get access to the resources they need to provide services of acceptable quality. There are regional issues too: how does Mumbai relate to the larger region in which it is located and the other local bodies in the region, and how can the relationship between these be managed?

Examples of gaps that arise out of these 'governance' related issues include:

Affordable housing: the lack of sufficient affordable housing is driven by a complex set of inter-related issues:

• Complexity of current regulations and control on urban land
• Social issues of the poor and how they are oppressed
• Challenges in enforcement, due to political interference and criminal-politician nexus
• Poor urban planning that extends from the neighbourhood to the metropolitan level
• Weak design and implementation of urban infrastructure projects, resulting in time and financial costs
• Lack of opportunities for citizens to participate
• Insufficient financial resources available to urban local bodies

These issues cannot be solved merely by thinking of the urban 'quality of life' problem purely in visible or transactional terms.  These challenges arise because there is something more fundamentally wrong with how our cities are run.

Viewed in this perspective, the approach of solving only transactional issues seems an over-simplification of the complex urban challenges that confront Mumbai.

It is this perspective that can be called 'Urban Governance': analysing Mumbai's problems through this prism of institutional arrangements and deeper issues helps to answer the more complex questions, and offer answers that - while their implementation may take time and political will, technical competence and administrative skill - are the ones that will result in long-term sustainable improvements to quality of life in Mumbai.