9 highlights
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The lockdown has made it amply clear that India is too large, too complex and too diverse to be run by centralized decree.
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In India, even within a municipal block, richer neighborhoods are likely less affected than poorer areas, especially slums.
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One of India’s biggest mistakes is not creating sufficient local government capacity.
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In 1992, Parliament corrected this deficiency by passing the 73rd and 74th Constitutional amendments, creating panchayati raj institutions (PRIs) and urban local bodies (ULBs).
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The first failure is that the 73rd and 74th amendments did not mandate the transfer of governance functions—like the provision of education, health, sanitation and water—to them. Instead, the amendments listed the functions that ‘could’ be transferred and left it to the state legislature to actually devolve functions.
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A common example of this is the existence of dysfunctional state-level water boards, performing tasks that should be left to elected representatives of local governments
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The second failure of the 73rd and 74th Amendments is the lack of finances for PRIs and ULBs. Local governments can either raise their own revenue through local taxes or receive intergovernmental transfers; the constitutional amendment recognized both but did not mandate either.
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Municipal revenue accounts for a small share of gross domestic product (GDP) in India, hovering around 1% of GDP from 2007-08 to 2017-18. This proportion was 4.5% for Poland, 6.0% for South Africa, 7.4% for Brazil, 13.9% for the United Kingdom and 14.2% for Norway in 2010.
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PRIs and ULBs are powerless without the devolution of functions and finances. They have been waiting for over two decades now to develop from merely constitutional and democratic institutions into governance institutions.