India’s Missing Mayoral Power: India’s Unfinished Urban Governance System

Walking into a Metropolitan civic body on any particular working day in India, one would notice that the person signing off on critical determinants of urban life in the water pipeline contracts, hiring sanitation staff, and deciding ward-specific allocations is not the mayor. The person who determines these is the municipal commissioner, typically an IAS officer answerable to the chief secretary rather than to the electorate. The mayor is often a short-term appointment whose main job is restricted to ribbon-cutting and chairing meetings, with little capacity to enforce. The Indian urban governance system, unlike London, New York, Bogota, or even Seoul, has never truly had a single point person citizens can credit or blame for how well or badly the city is being run. 

Illustration by The Geostrata

COLONIAL HANGOVER

The split reaches back to the cantonment logic popularised in the colonial era that treated cities as sites of revenue extraction and order maintenance rather than instilling a sense of self-government. The attempt made to modernise and address this was the 74th Amendment of the Constitution, passed in 1992. 

The amendment was supposed to fix this by transferring 18 specific functions, such as planning, slum improvement, water supply, and fire services, among others, to the elected local urban bodies. 

Three decades later, a CAG performance audit across 18 states found that only 4 of those 18 functions, like burial grounds, public amenities, prevention of cruelty to animals, and slaughterhouse regulation, have actually been devolved with full autonomy to the local level. Everything of actual consequence, like city planning, housing, and water, stayed with parastatal authorities or the commissioner’s desk. NITI Aayog’s own review found 61% of city governments were functioning without a term-compliant elected council at the time of assessment, with average election delays of nearly two years. 

Adding this to a mayoral system where the term itself varies wildly across the nation- 1 year in Bengaluru, 2.5 in Mumbai, and 5 in Bhopal gave India a system where you get institutions that are too transient actually to accumulate expertise or accountability of any substantial kind. Municipal election turnout averages well below the national average for general and assembly elections, which demonstrates that the electorate has subtly priced in the fact that a vote for a mayor, compared to other elections, does not buy any true executive power. 

KARNATAKA'S EFFORTS TO ADDRESS THIS

Karnataka’s attempt to fix this deficit is instructive to the discourse because, while a good-faith attempt, it largely failed in doing so.

The Greater Bengaluru Governance Act broke the old, unified BBMP into five smaller city corporations in an attempt at devolution.

Each corporation had its own mayor and council. In theory, the smaller units would be more governable, and this reform would lead to some change. However, the actual executive authority still sits with the Chief Minister’s chair, overarching the Greater Bengaluru Authority through a state-appointed commissioner who runs day-to-day affairs. The commissioner continued to answer to the Chief Minister rather than to the City’s mayor, with no true mandated line of coordination. Eventually, the entire attempt remained a decentralisation of geographical administration rather than executive power. 

FOREIGN MODELS

The Indian system differs significantly from comparative foreign models. The much-touted Chinese “mayor economy,” for one, is not a Mayoral model in the Western sense. It is a model crafted to be a competitive federal structure where Mayors compete in order to be promoted to higher political ranks.

Mayors are actually incentivised to compete on GDP and investment to climb up the party hierarchy but remain accountable to Beijing rather than voters. 

The American model, by contrast, forms an elected executive who runs a department and proposes budgets. The mayor is checked by an independently elected council that can override vetoes and audit spending. This remains the same logic that acts as a check and balance to the White House, shrunk to the city level. The mayor remains accountable to voters, and the council acts as a functional guardrail. The Indian system has borrowed the worst elements of either system and missed out on the best of both: a state-appointed executive with something mildly similar to Chinese upward mobility but wrapped in the traditional system of a Western mayor, reaping the benefits of neither in a meaningful manner. 

SCOPE FOR REFORMS

Orienting the lessons from China and the United States, power and accountability need to sit in the same office. China gets its speed because promotion and delivery are tightly positioned together. America gets it because the election and delivery are tightly positioned together. India tries to do both and eventually gets neither combination. The decision that India needs to follow is not a cosmetic reorganisation like seen in Karnataka, but rather systemic changes like moving towards an elected mayor with a nationally fixed term of 5 years, with a council that can check on the mayor, akin to the American system.

In a mapped-out manner, the fix requires extensive sequencing, too, starting with the constitutionally mandated five-year terms to close the loopholes that states have used to divert polls. The second would be to make the commissioner a subordinate officer who reports to the elected mayor rather than the state government, to the extent that the officer is removable by the mayor, to give genuine administrative power to the office of the mayor.

Finally, mayors also lack resources; the government would need to make state finance commission recommendations binding, like national commissions, so that functional devolution actually happens and the mayoral office gets power backed with the resources to execute urban governance projects. All three of these reforms need Indian federalism to accept a truth that has been avoided since the 1990s: that a strong city requires one single address for power, and until an Indian mayor becomes a person one can freely point at and expect direct accountability from, the 74th Amendment will remain incomplete for the foreseeable future.    

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BY KRISH

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com