Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation

Unlike the centre and state budgets, there's little discussion on municipal budgets in India. Multiple media reports highlight that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is India's richest municipal corporation with a budget higher than most states. But there's little awareness on what the budget entails, how BMC earns or spends its money, and how can a citizen keep track of its revenue or expenditure. Here's a look at some of its core features before BMC presents its 2021-22 budget. Who prepares the budget? Budgets at the centre and state are prepared and presented by the respective Finance Ministers. But the…

Broken footpaths, leaky taps, or uncollected garbage, life in Mumbai must come with a crash course in grievance redressal methods. But it's only easy to lodge complaints with BMC, not get them resolved. Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is good at taking citizen complaints. You can call BMC's 1916 helpline where an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) will direct you to an operator who will note your complaint. Or you can log on to the BMC website where "complaints" is an easy find on the menu. Choose your preferred language and fill an online complaint form selecting your complaint category from the…

When we were moving to Mumbai, one of the major relocation tasks was finding a suitable house to live in. Suitable as in proximity to children’s school and husband’s office, size, furnishing, rent, amenities, and the like… things people look for while choosing a house. We knew a few people who were already living in the area and they indicated that the most efficient way of going about this would be to approach one (or more) of the many real estate agents who had set up shop for people like us (and for owners who had bought the houses but…

Few civic issues bring citizens together like Solid Waste Management (SWM). An important component of neighbourhood cleanliness and sanitation, SWM has formed the core of citizen-government partnership in Mumbai.  Repeated governments have tried to stir up citizen participation through SWM. In 1997, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) formalised the creation of citizen groups called Advanced Locality Management (ALM) in an attempt to involve citizens in neighbourhood cleanliness.  Most recently, Swachh Survekshan, part of the Swachh Bharat Mission, ranks cities across the country in categories of cleanliness and sanitation on four parameters, one of which is citizen feedback. The SBM guidelines…

A quick mapping of urban reforms in India confirms that power largely still vests with the state and central governments. Despite the 74th Constitutional Amendment, no state has devolved all 18 functions mentioned in the twelfth schedule such as urban planning, forestry, or slum improvement to municipal corporations that run India’s large metropolises. Praja, a non profit, that advocates for policy changes in urban governance, released an Urban Governance Index which explores four themes to understand the extent of urban decentralisation in India. The themes are empowered city-elected representatives and legislative structure; empowered city administration; empowered citizens; and fiscal empowerment. The…

Last week, Maharahstra's Cabinet Minister of Tourism and Environment, Aaditya Thackeray announced that Mumbai has been selected as a "C40 city"—a consortium of the world’s leading cities taking bold action against climate change. Thackeray also tweeted his belief that "cities can lead climate change initiatives", but this attribution seems like wishful thinking for Indian cities. Unlike New York City or Los Angeles in the United States, Mumbai is not empowered to lead climate change or any other initiative. Here are just a few lessons Mumbai can learn from Los Angeles (LA) whose mayor, Eric Garcetti, steered the committee that included…

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is a large, complex organisation whose functioning largely remains enveloped in secrecy. Its website is a maze; decisions taken by its pivotal body—the standing committee—out of the public radar; and calls for independent audits routinely blocked. Decoding BMC’s numerous services and mammoth budget is a daunting task, best performed by seasoned journalists and accounting experts.  ASICS 2017, an independent benchmarking of cities report, finds that BMC needs to “adopt open data standards, usher in radical transparency in finances and operations; systematically provide actionable data at a neighborhood level”.  Reports like these repeatedly highlight at a…

Several large municipal councils in the country have budgets which could be the envy of a small state government. A case in point is Brinhanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the corporation that runs Mumbai (20-21 Budget: 33,000 Crores). With such large budgets and huge manpower to execute the works, why is almost every civic facility in Mumbai in a sorry state? Roads, water supply and drainage, sanitation and healthcare facilities, municipal schools etc. scarcely bear any comparison with similar such facilities in more civilised countries. The answer is not far to seek. To prove the point, a recent news item in the…

What do COVID-19 figures in October and November tell us about the city's preparedness to fight the virus. Since June, the Maharashtra government has allowed a gradual unlocking of services in Mumbai. Non-essential shops, salons, and spas were permitted to open towards the end of June; and by August, malls had re-opened. On October 5, the government allowed restaurants and food courts to open and the Railways were instructed to increase the capacity on local trains. Many experts forewarned that these unlocking measures, while essential for the economy, would lead to another spike of cases in the city. But a…

India’s richest Municipal Corporation was once a paradigm of a financially independent urban local body. The Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act, 1888, mandates that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) never show a deficit budget. It never needed to, as a high inflow of cash through real estate premiums and octroi, a tax levied on the entry of goods in the city, was sufficient.  But in the past few years, the real estate sector has slowed and octroi is abolished. For its ₹33,441-crore budget of 2020-21, the municipal corporation had to dip into its Rs 78,669 crore reserves. These reserves or Fixed…