STATE WITHIN A STATE

Bikash Choudhury


Once again the Bombay Municipal Corporation is in election mode; but, will it be able to solve or at least cope with the challenges of administering a city of over 12.4 million populations with half a million floating population visiting the city on daily basis? Not only the city infrastructure but the entire governance architecture of the city is crumbling under the weight of management challenge of scale. Actually, the concept of Municipal Corporations have never been designed to deal with the complexity of governing a State; and therefore, organization designed to look after the civic services can’t be expected to run a State of Mumbai’s dimension, complexity, challenges and National & Global importance. Mumbai is suffering from acute infrastructure deficit and scarcity of land and coupled with those administration bottlenecks stunting the growth of city; much like, other Global Cities. The Mickensey plan of converting Mumbai into a global city by 2013 with investment of 50 billion USD must be gathering dust in the Mantralaya cupboard. Why not convert Mumbai into a city State within the State of Maharastra-“State within a State”. Mumbai could have its own State Assembly and Chief Minister with the mandate to convert Mumbai into one of the best Global Financial Capital. A State Finance commission could be set up to decide on the distribution of tax revenue between State of Maharastra and City State of Mumbai. Further Mumbai could be divided into 12 corporations with ten lakhs of population each for better administration. With inception of Mumbai City State; may be the Infrastructure & Governance deficit won’t vanish over night. However, this would certainly develop appropriate governance architecture with competent human resources to run Mumbai as a smart city. Residents of Mumbai would go head over hill with such a prospect. Can the demand for a City State status for Mumbai enter into the election manifesto of political parties in this Bombay Municipal Election?