India’s booming economy can’t fix its cities—because no one’s in charge

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India is getting richer every year, but its cities don’t seem to be getting any more livable. Not because the country is too poor, or because leaders lack ambition, but because urban citizens are starved of funds and deprived of representation.

And the government’s in no hurry to fix it, even though people are dying as a result. Mumbai’s skyline is dotted with opulent glass towers, and it calls itself India’s commercial capital. The civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, is the country’s richest.

And yet residents have lived for years with no say in how their city was being run. When it finally held local polls last month, it was after a gap of nearly a decade. The equivalent city authority in Bengaluru, home to world-beating tech companies, hasn’t allowed people to vote for its leadership since 2015.

It will hopefully happen later this year—only because the Supreme Court put its foot down last month. This carelessness about local polls is a widespread problem: Last year, the urban governance nonprofit Janaagraha estimated that 61% of urban governments in 17 of 28 states had their elections delayed. Residents suffer when this happens, but powerful state-level politicians don’t care.

That’s because they then get to handpick their favourite bureaucrats as stand-in administrators. When the local administration is unelected, it’s also unaccountable and unresponsive. It can focus on wringing revenue out of cities without having to do much to provide decent conditions to urban taxpayers.