NITI Aayog Urges Elected Mayors at 2nd National Urban Conclave

India will not reach its Viksit Bharat @ 2047 goal unless the way its cities are planned, governed and paid for is rebuilt from the ground up, Rajiv Gauba, Member of NITI Aayog, said while closing the 2nd National Urban Conclave. He was speaking at the valedictory session of the conclave, and his argument through the address was a single one: towns and cities are where growth is made, and the bodies that run them are the weakest link in the chain.

The scale of the shift ahead

The country's population will keep growing for several more decades and settle at roughly 165 crore around 2060, Gauba said. By 2050 something close to half of all Indians are expected to be living in urban areas, which would take the urban population from about 50 crore at present to 85 crore. Housing, water, transport and the other basic services that many people will need cannot be supplied by the arrangements now in place.

What has gone into cities so far

Planned settlements are old in India, Gauba noted, yet cities were left relatively neglected in the decades after independence. Since 2014 that has been reversed through a series of large missions, among them Smart Cities, AMRUT, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, Swachh Bharat and the Urban Livelihoods Mission. Money set aside for the urban sector has multiplied ten times over, and metro rail and bus systems alone have drawn investment of close to three and a half lakh crore rupees and more.

Mayors who are actually elected

Gauba drew on Moving Towards Effective City Governance, a report prepared jointly by NITI Aayog and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs. It asks for mayors chosen directly by voters for a full term of five years, for a Mayor-in-Council arrangement, and for municipal elections that are held when they are due rather than whenever a State finds it convenient. It also asks States to hand over every one of the 18 functions that the 74th Amendment lists for urban local bodies, master planning, water supply, fire services and traffic among them. A city, he said, cannot be run from the State capital, and only a council with real authority and real staff can answer to the people who live there.

Cities need money of their own

Municipal revenues stay low, and Gauba pressed for better recovery of property tax and user charges. Grants to urban local bodies from the Central Finance Commission have more than doubled over the previous award and their share has risen to 45 per cent from 36 per cent, but what States themselves pass down to cities remains small. He wanted State Finance Commissions constituted on schedule and a dependable flow of funds to municipal bodies.

Planning rules and rental homes

Tight floor area ratios and building norms hold back the supply of land and push up costs for homes and businesses alike, and Gauba asked for them to go. In their place he recommended mixed-use zoning, building around transit hubs and land pooling. Rental housing that migrant workers, factory labour, students and young professionals can afford was the other gap he pointed to, and he urged States to adopt the Model Tenancy Act to widen that supply. All of it, he concluded, can be carried through if States enact new Municipal Acts, and he asked the housing ministry to tie support under the urban missions to those reforms.