The Seventy-Fourth Constitutional Amendment, enacted in 1992, granted constitutional status to municipalities, requiring States to entrust them with all necessary powers, functions and responsibilities, so that the municipalities could function as effective institutions of local self-government. Pursuant to the Amendment, all States passed their own Municipal Acts, specifying the structure and composition of Urban Local Bodies, their powers and functions, their administration, and finances, hoping that democratically elected local bodies would ensure clean and liveable, urban areas.
However, this has not happened, even in metropolises, because of serious deficiencies in implementation. The CAG in its 2024 report titled “Compendium of Performance Audits on the Implementation of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992: Landscape across India” studied 393 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across 18 states, catering to 24.1 crore residents. They noticed several shortcomings; for example, only four of the eighteen functions that should have been devolved, had been completely devolved, only 29 per cent of municipal expenditure was on programmatic and developmental work, and on average 37 per cent posts were vacant.
Finances of ULBs were in a sorry state; there was a 42 per cent gap between their resources and expenditure, only 56 per cent of property tax demands had been collected, and ULBs could generate only 32 per cent of their revenue, with 68 per cent being transfers from the Union and State governments – putting them at the mercy of the Government, a situation that was sought to be avoided by the 74th Amendment. The public has suffered immensely because of the failure of municipalities to discharge their essential functions, with the national capital Delhi being a prime example. Every winter, the air quality index of Delhi deteriorates to ‘severe’ on most days and occasionally crosses 400 to be classified as ‘hazardous.’
The problem was flagged in 1985 when environmentalist M.C Mehta filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court, claiming that existing environmental laws obliged the government to reduce air pollution. Remedial measures ordered by the Supreme Court, like conversion of all government vehicles, buses and autos plying in Delhi to compressed natural gas (CNG) brought down air pollution to acceptable levels. However, newer sources of pollution emerged, and after notification of the National Air Quality Index, under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan in 2014, it is seen that AQI touches stratospheric heights every winter.
Delhi is not an outlier; according to Clean Air Fund, a global philanthropic organisation, of the world’s 30 cities with the worst air pollution, 17 are in India. Then, Delhi traffic stops every time it rains for more than one hour. Low-lying areas get flooded; in addition to general inconvenience and losses, every year some unfortunate people die in flooded basements, or after falling in manholes. Here also Delhi is not alone; urban flooding is a recurrent phenomenon in other metropolises also, with floods in Chennai in 2015 and 2021; in Hyderabad in 2020 and 2021; in Bengaluru and Ahmedabad in 2022; and in Nagpur in 2023. Other cities like Chandigarh, Gurugram, Patna, Gaya, Pune, Jaipur, Bhopal, Indore, Lucknow, Kochi, Dehradun and Shimla ~ all have experienced flooding in the recent past.
Ever-present traffic snarls and slums compound the misery of citizens. One can safely say that urban living is not very salubrious ~ except for the super-rich ~ in any city in India. An emerging problem in Indian cities is of water contamination; between January 2025 and 7 January 2026, at least 34 people died, and 5,500 people fell ill in 26 cities, including 16 state capitals, across 22 states and Union territories, after consuming sewage-contaminated piped drinking water.
The worst-affected was Indore, where more than 20 people have died, and hundreds have fallen ill, after a sewage pit at a police outpost leaked into a corroded water pipe below. Other than Indore, Gandhinagar in Gujarat, regions around Hyderabad in Telangana, Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and Rohtak and Jhajjar in Haryana, too have reported water contamination, due to similar reasons. This is paradoxical considering the fact that the PM himself launched the Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT 1.0) in June 2015 to complete the urban renewal programme in 500 cities, by FY 2019-20, intending to provide 139 lakh water connections, 145 lakh sewer connections, storm water drainage projects, green spaces, and LED streetlights, at a cost of Rs.50,000 crore.
AMRUT 1.0 was subsumed in AMRUT 2.0 in 2021, which aimed at providing universal coverage of water supply through functional taps, to all households in all statutory towns in the country, and coverage of sewerage management in 500 cities covered in the first phase of the AMRUT scheme, by 31 March 2026. AMRUT 2.0 has a budget of Rs.2,99,000 crore. One wonders where this humongous sum of money has been spent? Another irony is that Indore has been rated as the cleanest city in India, consecutively, for the last eight years in the National City Rating, under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan.
Additionally, Indore was designated as India’s first “Water Plus” city in 2021 as a recognition of its excellence in wastewater management, and its success in eliminating the discharge of untreated wastewater into water bodies. The Supreme Court has held that the right of access to safe drinking water is a Fundamental Right, as part of the Right to Life, under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Court further held that there was a duty cast on the State, to provide clean drinking water to its citizens. Thus, at the very least, it was expected that Indore and other municipalities should have a functional water quality management system, and complaints about poor water quality would be attended expeditiously.
This obviously did not happen, either in Indore or even in Gandhinagar, which has a much-acclaimed sewage system. CAG Report 3 of 2019, containing significant results of the performance audit, and compliance audit of the functioning of various departments of Madhya Pradesh Government, including the Department of Public Health and Family Welfare, pointed out that 5.45 lakh cases of waterborne diseases were recorded in Indore and Bhopal, between 2013 and 2018.
On 29 February 2024, the corporator for the affected area in Indore, had written to the Mayor about water contamination, and just before the tragedy, residents had lodged several complaints about contaminated water, but to no avail. There was no shortage of funds in Indore; Rs 2,450 crore were being spent annually on water supply from the municipal budget, along with several thousand crores, channelled through the Asian Development Bank, AMRUT Scheme, and the Smart City Project. The aftermath of the Indore tragedy has been disappointing. Some junior officials have been suspended, and some senior ones, like the Municipal Commissioner have been transferred.
Authorities such as the Chief Minister and High Court have issued directions to ensure supply of clean water. This is not likely to help, as the roadmap is clearly laid out, and the failure was of implementation. Probably, a proper inquiry could find out what went wrong with a view to prevent such occurrences in future. Coming to reasons for municipal maladministration, for long politicians and government officials have treated municipalities as cash cows. A five-year tenure has been prescribed for urban local governments in Article 243U of the Constitution, which also mandates that elections should be held before the expiry of the five-year tenure.
Since State Governments do not want to lose control over municipalities, they try to delay constitution of Urban Local Bodies by various stratagems, preferring to control ULBs through administrators. The 2024 CAG Report on ULBs, points out that there was, on an average, a 22-month delay, in conducting municipal elections. Elections to the biggest Municipal Corporations reported significant delays – examples are 55 months’ delay for Bengaluru, more than 3 years for Mumbai, 24 months for Gurugram, and 7 months for Delhi. Moreover, municipal elections are held on party lines, with canvassing by top leaders.
Considerable sums are spent on elections, which are recovered many times over by successful candidates. The Indore tragedy also brings into question the clean city awards ~ which appear to have been decided on outward appearances. Carl I. Hagen, former Norwegian MP had said: “Politicians and bureaucrats are the new upper class in Norway. It is an upper class that is growing by an increasing number of top-paid politicians in municipalities and counties. They let the people suffer, but let themselves go free.” Substitute Norway with India, and you see the crux of the problem.
(The writer is a retired Principal Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax)