Directed decentralisation: Analysing the experience of decentralisation via jnnurm in Maharashtra

Abstract

In India, urban decentralisation is historically one of the most neglected subjects. Urban local governments received a new lease of life with the 74th Constitutional Amendment which created a third stratum of government at the city level. One of the purposes of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) was to take forward the unfinished business of decentralisation. Based on research in Maharashtra, a leading beneficiary under JNNURM funds, this chapter argues that the reform programme, in contrast to its stated objective, has further disempowered the urban local bodies and made them dependent on supra-levels of governance. This, it holds, is due to the highly homogenising frame of governance employed by JNNURM and the Maharashtra government. Decentralisation, thus, merely becomes part of a bureaucratic agenda. Further, it is subverted by local politics and administration. This chapter concludes that the project of urban decentralisation in developing countries like India has to be a political project that situates administrative decentralisation amidst an analysis of politico-economic interests at the local, state, and central levels. A bureaucratic exercise of reform is unlikely to make a dent in the by far stronger process of centralisation.