Imagining Municipal Corporation 2.0

Glimpses of what digital governance can do to our municipal corporations and the quality of life in Indian cities gives urban Indians plenty to hope for.

The municipal corporations in our cities exemplify the proverb that familiarity breeds contempt. They asphalt our streets, pick up our garbage, keep our street lights on, register our newborns, maintain crematoria, build and maintain parks and playgrounds and more. Yet, we in urban India are more enthused by the cabinet reshuffle in New Delhi and the winter session of Parliament than the monthly council meetings of our municipal corporations. Here we catch glimpses of how digital governance can help municipal corporations capture a greater share of the urban mindspace and make lives in our cities better with just a little imaginative thinking, of the digital kind.

Open data

Municipal corporations do not make laws or deal with nuclear security, nor do they have to worry about lunar expeditions or a counter-China strategy. There is no data that is dealt with by municipal corporations that cannot be put out in the public domain in a raw form. They stand to significantly gain on two fronts by wholeheartedly embracing open data. First, opening up all municipal data sets significantly reduces the administrative burden on municipal corporation offices that are possibly beset with thousands of queries on the status of various applications, petitions under the Right to Information Act and copious documentation on financial and operational details of public works. Opening up all data sets will substantially relieve them of the daily humdrum of responding to queries. Second, democratizing data is in itself a powerful accountability and anti-corruption tool. Open data will sharpen the functions of auditors and ombudsmen and orient them further towards outcomes.

Online voting and referendums in neighbourhoods

Urban Indians are erudite opinion-holders on global issues, but reluctant stakeholders in their own neighbourhoods. The learnedness, carefully preserved in their living rooms, does not, therefore, catalyse better neighbourhoods.

Municipal corporations need to permit, facilitate and persuade citizens to take ownership of their neighbourhoods.

If, for instance, each ward in a city (the administrative and electoral unit of a city is a ward and typically in a ward there could be, say, 50,000 residents comprising may be 10 neighbourhoods) gets an allocation of ₹ 3 crore for a year for works of various kinds, who decides in which neighbourhoods the money needs to be spent and towards what end? Currently, in most cities it is a bilateral transaction between the ward councillor and the administration, with the citizen relegated to the sidelines.

Online voting and referendums in neighbourhoods, facilitated by the municipal corporation website, could drastically transform citizen participation and civic ownership by citizens. From timings of parks to allocation of budgets, from segregation of garbage to neighbourhood policies on pets, from renting out bicycles to building a neighbourhood swimming pool, citizens can get together digitally at a neighbourhood level and verily create a “citizenscape” of sorts—the coming together of citizens resulting in an engaged community.

If Gandhi was alive, who can bet he would not have rooted for Ward Swaraj or Neighbourhood Swaraj a la Gram Swaraj, where democratic rights are accompanied by civic responsibilities and ownership.

Matching volunteers and civic issues

Most municipal corporations in India are either hugely understaffed or wrongly staffed. They do not have the human capacities and the right mix of skill sets required to transform a Chennai into Singapore or a Bangalore into Silicon Valley. On the other hand, citizens in urban India are rich in skill sets and ideas and could even have some time to spare, perhaps on weekends. If municipal corporations can convert some of their select civic issues which are currently perceived as service delivery failures, and convert them into volunteering opportunities for their citizens, the possibilities are endless. Back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal that in a city like Bangalore, with a population of 8.5 million, if 20% of the adult population were to spare 1 hour every Sunday, that is equivalent to the municipal corporation employing over 25,000 people for a year, which is possibly higher than its existing headcount.

Mowing lawns in public parks, teaching in schools with high teacher absenteeism, reading to children in an orphans’ home are all plausible if only people who have the time and skill sets know where to go, and people who have the need know whom to ask. The municipal corporation website can be the matchmaker!

Timesheets for councillors

Citizen report cards or performance report cards that objectively evaluate performance of elected representatives are a favourite among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for a good reason. Votaries of disclosure of income and wealth by candidates in elections also have a strong case in contemporary India. I have often wondered if elected representatives need to be accountable to citizens for their time as well. A true measure of performance is not just comparing what is promised with what is delivered, but instead a comparison of what is possible with how much is achieved. How do we presently know that councillors are spending their time improving our neighbourhoods and wards? The digital platform provides an opportunity for councillors to fill in daily or weekly timesheets explaining to their people what they have been doing with their time. Five years in an elected office, one would think, is a long time, and needs to be accounted for. This may be a radical proposition, perhaps disruptive and impractical, but yet one among a breed of ideas for accountability that only digital governance can offer.

The Municipal Corporation 2.0 is ready to take off. We only need willing pilots.