January 18, 2026 05:08 PM IST
First published on: Jan 18, 2026 at 06:52 AM IST
Last week, when the results came for the election to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, it was the Chief Minister of Maharashtra who made it clear that he was the hero of this victory. Nobody saw the incongruity. Did you? Did you while watching the results stop for a moment and think that it was absurd that a chief minister should be exulting in a municipal victory? When Zohran Mamdani became Mayor of New York city, it was his victory and his alone and if he does not deliver on the promises he made, he alone will be held responsible. The buck stops with the mayor in most major cities in the world but in our colonial system of governance this does not happen. So municipal governance simply does not exist. Everything is controlled by chief ministers who have many other things to attend to.
This is the real reason why most Indian cities routinely make the annual list of the worst governed cities of the world. This is why nearly half the citizens of Mumbai live in squalid shanties that have no access to basic municipal services like clean water and electricity. As someone who has lived in Mumbai for the most part of more than 30 years, I consider myself an honorary citizen of this magnificent, chaotic behemoth of a city. But I also spend a lot of time brooding over how much more magnificent and how much less chaotic it would be if it was governed by an elected mayor instead of an autocratic, unelected Municipal Commissioner.
This municipal commissioner will be appointed by the Chief Minister of Maharashtra and will control a budget that at Rs 74,427 crore is more than the budget of many small states. The man who has the misfortune to become the mayor plays a ceremonial role mainly because we continue with the colonial system of governance that we inherited from the British Raj. So, it should not surprise us at all that as we slouch towards becoming ‘viksit’ by 2047, a metropolis that should be Singapore or Hong Kong is unable to provide millions of its citizens with a need so fundamental as affordable housing.
If you want to see wretchedness and unspeakable urban squalor, all you need to do is spend a morning in a Mumbai slum. I have had the occasion to do this many times and can report that living conditions are worse here than they are in the wreckage of war-torn Gaza. Or at least as bad. The inhabitants of these slums live in windowless hovels on the edge of drains so clogged with waste that they have become solid pipelines of garbage. Most slum dwellers have access to cell phones and televisions but the electricity they use is stolen from municipal supplies with the complicity of corrupt officials.
Similar conditions exist for poorer citizens in all our metropolises. If you think life is more salubrious in smaller towns, think again. It is worse. Last week, a viral video from Gonda (in ‘double engine’-ruled Uttar Pradesh) showed rats as big as kittens crawling up oxygen tanks and into patients’ beds. And as someone who has the misfortune to have travelled to many other small towns in this state, believe me when I tell you that I have seen schools built in garbage dumps and hospitals that stink of open drains and uncleaned lavatories.
It might be repetitive, but I reiterate that there is no municipal governance in India. In Narendra Modi’s first term I believed that as Prime Minister he would understand the importance of rectifying the mistake that the Congress Party made by not paying attention to things like planned urbanisation and disposal of urban waste. It saddens me that in not a single state run by the Bharatiya Janata Party has this happened. In Delhi, which now has a BJP chief minister, an intrepid reporter visited the city’s most famous government hospital and video-taped patients and their relatives sleeping on a pavement in the icy cold of a winter night with only plastic sheets and raggedy blankets to keep them warm. There was no room in the night shelter that the hospital provided.
The fault lies not just with our corrupt, uncaring officials, some of it lies with us in the media. Somehow, we have come to believe that it is more important to cover politics and political bickering than governance. The reporters covering the BMC elections have at no point during this campaign reminded voters that they need to vote for better urban services by drawing attention to how rotten these services are. The reporters that did venture into the congested, stinky wasteland in which half of Mumbai’s citizens live restricted themselves to asking voters which party they would be voting for.
The reunion of the Shiv Sena heirs of Bal Thackeray was given more attention than the city’s real problems. By next week, this municipal election will be forgotten and life in Mumbai will go on as it does now. A handful of people who can afford to live in the glistening new buildings that are rising high above the squalor of this metropolis have a living standard that is comparable to the best in the best cities in the world. They remain totally indifferent to how the other half lives until one of their domestic servants brings some disease from the slums into their homes.
