Governance

“People in Chennai have almost forgotten what it is like to have an elected representative from their wards,” jokes Charu Govindan, coordinator of Chennai-based citizen's group, Voice of People. Charu was referring to how the city has gone without an elected local body council for an entire term since 2016. Although the official website of the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) still states that the administrative set up includes a council of 200 councillors, headed by a Mayor, that hasn’t been the case in the past five years. Local body elections have not been held since the term of the last…

Ever since its launch in 2018, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has been trying to include his “revolutionary step” of doorstep delivery of rations in Delhi to the list of 100 services presently available under this scheme. Presently, people pick up their rations from Fair Price Shops (FPS) under the Public Distribution Scheme (PDS).  The state government was all set to roll out the scheme initially on March 25th, and again in mid-June. Both times, Lt Governor Anil Baijal ensured it did not happen. Baijal represents the BJP-led Central government that has constantly been at loggerheads with the AAP government. The…

I had just spent a wonderful evening with friends on Residency Road, one mid-January evening this year. At the time, the world was between waves of the pandemic, but one could sense that people wanted to be out in the world again, meeting people, shopping, traveling. I was undoubtedly one of them. So here I was, returning home as I had always done before the pandemic hit, in an auto-rickshaw at 9 p.m. I was scrolling through social media on the phone, unaware of just how much the world around me had changed. But to be on the safer side,…

Over the past 15 years, not a single corporator has lost their seat or been disqualified because they indulged in corrupt practices during the elections. 23 corporators have lost their seats in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), mostly due to submission of false caste certification. But, the BMC has failed to lodge criminal proceedings against them, and has restricted itself to just replacing them with the election runners-up.  This is not to suggest that electoral malpractices do not take place during Mumbai’s civic elections. But according to the nominated corporator on the BEST panel, Sunil Ganacharya, most charges of electoral…

“I feel like crying when talking about the problems we are facing now,” laments Mary, a resident of Chennai’s Perumbakkam resettlement colony, who has been grappling with the recent floods. “We do not have access to water, electricity or food. Government authorities have not taken any relief measures whatsoever.” Anguished voices such as Mary's are now echoing across the resettlement colonies in the city. Unlike buildings elsewhere, people on the ground floor were not the only ones who had water enter their homes. “The top floors had water leaking in many of the buildings because the construction is of poor…

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is on a mission to recover arrears of property taxes worth about Rs 20,000 crore. The BMC is auctioning articles like helicopters, cars and air conditioners, seized from a private company in 2020, to recover Rs 4.1 crores. They've sent notices and acted against 11,661 defaulters. Though the BMC always had the power to disconnect water and/or electricity connections, seal lifts and entrances of properties, they’ve rarely executed this authority. Now, owing to COVID-19, the richest municipal corporation in the country is feeling the pinch.  However, the focus has been on wealthy defaulters, and the common…

Families of six workers who worked in a shoe factory in Delhi’s Udyog Vihar, had to wait two days in front of the factory for the charred remains of victims of an industrial fire in the factory on June 23rd this year to be found. The fire broke out in a three-story building trapping 12 workers inside. It took 140 firefighters over six hours to control the fire, rescuing six while the other six died inside the building. On November 13, another fire broke out in a jacket manufacturing factory in Seelampur, Delhi. Five workers were rescued from inside the…

Citizens from Marol are going door-to-door with a signature campaign against the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) for its failure to retrieve gardens from three hotels on the Marol-Juhu belt near Mumbai airport. The hotels were supposed to hand over the garden plots to BMC for public use. “That these three garden plots, with a cumulative measure of approximately 1.3 lakh sq ft of area, are yet to be accessible for public use, should give us a clue about how public open spaces occupied by private groups, star hotels in this case, are inaccessible in Mumbai’s highly urbanised and congested landscape,”…

The general rule for contesting in a local civic body election is that the person should be more than 21 years of age and should be a resident of Mumbai. Section 14 of the Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act, 1888 stipulates that the contesting candidate in the BMC elections must be enrolled as a voter in the jurisdiction of Mumbai. Since 1995, when the Maharashtra Municipal Corporations and Municipal Councils, Nagar Panchayats and Industrial Townships (Second Amendment) Act, 1995 came into force, a corporator cannot have more than two children. Gulshan Chouhan, a corporator from South Mumbai, was disqualified in 2011…

At Citizen Matters, we review the promises made in the respective electoral manifestos by all four leading electoral parties, namely, the Shiv Sena (SS), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) ahead of the BMC elections in February 2022.  We review whether these promises made by them have been delivered, and where Mumbai currently stands on these issues. To kick start the series, we look at the promises made on the issue of providing clean and safe water supply.   Water requirement in Mumbai  Mumbai currently provides 188 litres per capita per…