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Click here to access the document and put in your suggestions. And do share with your friends/ family/ colleagues and encourage them to do the same.
It’s going to be a hot and sunny day today, I murmur to myself, not six days since the floods that wrecked havoc in Mumbai on August 29. Partially uncomfortable, yet partially relieved, I was watching a young boy sipping juice, clinging to his mother on a scooter right next to me in traffic. A cold, juice box sounded good to me too. Yet, before I could smile at his naughty face, he flung his empty box onto the road with reckless abandon. His mother didn’t flinch.
Who do we hold responsible here? The yearly floods and subsequent infrastructure degradation only make clear the cracks in our growing metropolis. The broken roads and potholes, a flood management system that hasn’t improved an inch since 2006’s floods, plastic-clogged drains, improper water conservation, waste disposal and management – what can we do to change this scenario? How do we make sure that these are carried out efficiently?
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is India’s richest civic body with a budget larger than all other smaller states put together – budget for the year 2017-18 is INR 25,141 crore, albeit less than what it has previously been. Mumbai’s Municipal Corporation may have the highest budget but as Hindustan Times reported, in the last ten years, a mere 18 percent of the INR 2.19 lakh-crore budget was actually spent on civic infrastructure. “A RTI revealed that a total of 2,067 BMC employees are facing inter-departmental probes, out of which 104 Class A employees (includes senior bureaucrats from the All India Services and Central Civil Services) are under the scanner, including 2 deputy municipal commissioners, three chief fire officers, 19 doctors and 44 executive engineers. The state of affairs is nothing less than appalling,” wrote Saurabh Modi for First Post.
It is a grim state of affairs, and as we grumble and point fingers at the BMC following the recent flooding while politicians point their own fingers in directions of their choosing, we also need to realise that this blame-game isn’t helping anyone. We’re going to have to get our own hands dirty if we want things to change. How can we make the BMC answerable for the issues and ensure that our taxes are actually being put to good use? How do we increase transparency, checks and balances in a bureaucratic set-up? Perhaps, what we need is a quarterly citizen’s committee where we audit the work being done, or an open-forum discussion/meeting with BMC officials and representatives. The problem though, extends itself to a much larger issue than being solely limited to the flaws in this system; it’s a problem that concerns you and me as well. We are the ‘public’ in public infrastructure, and to really mend the snags, we have to start being accountable too. I may not be throwing plastic bottles and such on the roads, but I too am guilty of stubbing the occasional cigarette on the pavement.
So, what can we, as citizens, do to improve our city? Neither can work successfully without the other, it is as much the BMC’s responsibility as it is the people who live here, to really come together. We need to put pressure on officials as much as each other.
In this vein, we at Homegrown felt the need to push this thinking forward. To begin with, we have created an open, public document where we encourage citizens of Mumbai to put in their thoughts, suggestions and ideas on how we can make the BMC more accountable, what we ourselves can do to instil civic pride, and what we can do to enforce change, rather than let budgets and plans remain proposals on paper. Such a task can seem daunting, but small-step resolutions and a citizen’s pledge to promote and instil change in our daily lives is a step we need to take in the right direction.
Click here to access the document and put in your suggestions. And do share with your friends/ family/ colleagues and encourage them to do the same.
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