Three years without civic body polls has been punishment for Mumbai

A broken lane in a slum settlement in Mumbai’s Kurla has kept residents on tenterhooks.

“Sometimes, sewage water leaks out of the damaged manhole covers,” said Rizwan Shaikh. “That attracts rats and we fear they will bite our children.”

Over the last few months, women from the Bharti Nagar slum have visited the local ward office several times to complain. But the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is yet to undertake repair work in the lane.

Not far from Kurla, on April 24, Draupadi Gholak booked a taxi to take her paralysed husband to the Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital in Sion.

He had been advised by his doctor to get an MRI scan. Gholak says the MRI machine was unavailable. “Who do we go to to complain about this?” she asked.

In the west of Mumbai, the cardiac catheterisation laboratory at the municipality’s Dr RN Cooper hospital, has been shut for some weeks.

Former municipal corporator Rajul Patel contacted the municipal corporation several times, asking them to restart the services. When nothing was done, she wrote a letter to the Member of Parliament of Mumbai North West, Ravindra Waikar, seeking his intervention.

From basic civic amenities to health facilities, Mumbai residents have been struggling to get the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation to address their problems, ever since the five-year term of its 227 elected corporators ended in March 2022.

For the last three years, India’s richest civic body has been running without elected representatives under “administrator rule” – which means that the municipal commissioner, appointed by the state government, is in charge of making all decisions.

Former corporator Sachin Padwal described the collapse of services pithily: “Water, meter or gutter, no work”.

“This is what happens when there are no corporation elections,” he told Scroll.

The current delay in elections – 37 months and counting – is the longest the corporation has seen. The last time the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation was under administrator rule was for 15 months in 1984 and 1985.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ordered the state election commission to notify local body elections in Mumbai – and across Maharashtra – in four weeks.

Mumbai is spread over 437 sq km and is divided into 227 wards, each represented by a corporator.

A corporator is crucial to keep the city running. His or her primary responsibility is to ensure the efficient delivery of civic amenities in the area – fixing roads and streetlights, cleaning drains, overseeing garbage collection, timely fogging to keep mosquitos away.

Corporators are also part of the general body that debates and votes on larger policies, proposals and by-laws, sometimes forcing the Municipal Corporation to recall its decisions.

“In their absence, a link between people and the government is lost,” said Nayana Kathpalia, a trustee at NAGAR, an NGO that works on good governance. “Now, people have to approach ward officers for everything.” Ward officers are recruited to the municipal corporation after taking a state public service exam.

In the absence of corporators, many Mumbaikars who need a problem solved have chosen to visit the local offices of political parties to register their grievance instead of than visiting ward offices, said Milind Mhaske, founder director at Praja, an organisation that works towards accountable governance. “They find a BMC office intimidating and most people avoid going there,” Mhaske said.

For instance, domestic worker Vijaya Kamble has been bothered by the rise in mosquitoes in the area as civic body officials have delayed fogging. “Going to a corporator with a complaint is easy,” said Kamble. “I can do it on my way to work. But we don’t have time to go to the ward office and wait for hours.”

A few kilometres away at Chembur Naka, Prashant Patel said unchecked construction work in his area is causing water to collect in all the pits dug on the building sites. “They are breeding grounds for mosquitoes,” Patel told Scroll. “But the BMC is not carrying out fogging nor is it doing anything about these construction sites.”

Patel said that in the absence of corporators, civic officials “feel they are not accountable anymore”.

Election delay

It is not just the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, but elections in 27 municipal corporations, 243 nagar parishads and 289 rural panchayats have been pending across Maharashtra. This means that most urban and rural bodies have been operating without elected representatives. The terms of these representatives for various bodies ended between 2020 and 2022.

In Mumbai, elections are crucial, not just because of the city’s financial importance but because winning the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections is a political prize.

Before the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition government collapsed in 2022 after a split in the Shiv Sena, it had increased the number of municipal wards in Mumbai from 227 to 236, as part of a delimitation exercise in November 2021.

The decision was reversed when a new government was formed under the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and BJP in 2022. The Bombay High Court upheld Shinde’s decision but the matter is pending before the Supreme Court, which is reviewing the legality of the restructuring of wards.

The Supreme Court is also hearing a petition on reservations for Other Backward Classes in local bodies. OBC communities account for over 38% of the Maharashtra’s population, a significant vote bank.

The Maharashtra government had announced 27% reservation for OBCs in local bodies. But in 2021, the decision was struck down by the Supreme Court because it breached the 50% limit the court had set on the total number of reservations.

In 2022, the Maharashtra government again announced 27% reservation in certain rural and smaller urban bodies based on the recommendations of the JK Banthia Commission. Since then the matter has been under judicial review.

The state election commission had cited these reasons for not conducting local body elections.

On Tuesday, however, the Supreme Court passed an interim order directing the state election commission to notify dates for all local body elections, including the Mumbai municipal corporation, within four weeks and conduct elections within four months.

The bench, headed by Justice Surya Kant and NK Singh, observed, “In our considered opinion, the constitutional mandate of grassroots democracy through periodical elections to local bodies ought to be respected and ensured.”

The bench directed the election commission to maintain the OBC quota of 19% that existed before the Banthia Commission report. This means that the 27% reservation for OBCs will be held in abeyance, at least for the upcoming polls.

Before the court’s direction, some leaders had accused the Election Commission of stalling the polls.

“If the commission wanted, they would have ensured elections,” said Padwal, who belongs to the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena. “But they deliberately delayed it.”

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has been ruled by the Shiv Sena since 1997. Padwal believes the delay in elections was intended to benefit the Mahayuti government: the alliance of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena faction led by Eknath Shinde’ and the Nationalist Congress Party faction led by Ajit Pawar is hoping to wrest control of India’s richest civic body.

No funds for Opposition?

In the absence of elected civic representatives, members of the state legislative assembly have been looking after all the municipal wards in their constituency. Most crucially, they have had to coordinate with guardian ministers, who had the power to allocate municipal funds.

Each MLA in Mumbai is eligible to receive Rs 35 crore from the Mumbai municipality for his or her constituency. But Padwal says there is already a visible bias in the manner the money is being allocated. Ruling party corporators “are getting as much as Rs 9 crore per year”, Padwal alleged. “Our corporators are getting nothing.”

The guardian ministers in Mumbai belongs to the BJP, while the one from the Mumbai suburban district owes allegiance to Shinde’s Shiv Sena.

This has also led to an exodus from Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena to Shinde’s Sena faction. Rajul Patel, the former corporator of Versova, was among those who made the jump. She said after she switched parties earlier this year, she has been able to get work done in her ward.

“When I was in the opposition party, BMC officials would not listen to me,” she told Scroll. “Funds were a problem.”

Delay in civic work

Opposition leaders complain that their wards are suffering from the lack of funds and the delay in the elections.

“Development of a ward depends on which political party the former corporator in that ward belongs to,” said Ashraf Azmi, a former Congress corporator in Kurla. Though he is not a corporator any more, Azmi’s phone rings incessantly with complaints from residents about fogging, drain cleaning, road repairs and water shortage.

Azmi said he is helpless.

“For minor work like garbage collection, I call BMC officials and the work is done,” he said. “But for major work like road repair, they can take days to respond or not respond at all. Earlier I could use my funds for a community toilet repair. Now that is not possible.”

When Bharti Nagar residents called Azmi to repair their lane, he had to ask them to reach out directly to civic officials.

In Jogeshwari’s HBT Trauma hospital, another facility run by Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the intensive care unit was shut for one 12-hour period in March due to the absence of doctors.

Patel, also the former chairman of the civic body’s health committee, said that when such issues were raised in the general body earlier, it would lead to outrage – and action. “The BMC would be quick to rectify them,” Patel said. “But not anymore. We could do nothing about it.”

No debate on policy issues

Beyond the civic issues, larger policy decisions are being made by bureaucrats without any debate. Azmi said corporators would move motions or raise debates on crucial public projects. “That brought accountability in the system,” he said.

He said the recent decision of the municipality to hand over its hospitals to private players would have been met by protests from corporators in the house.

“The civic body is also changing the reservation status of several plots and handing it over to private players,” Azmi said. “All we can do is write letters to the BMC commissioner to show opposition.” He was referring to plots marked as “open spaces” or “parks” by the BMC in the Development Plan that is prepared every 20 years to plan infrastructure for the city.

Padwal raises another issue. Recently, the municipal corporation released draft cleanliness and sanitation by-laws for 2025, which levy a user fee for collection of garbage from individual flat owners.

Padwal said not everyone can afford to pay to get their garbage collected. “If there was an elected general body, corporators would have opposed this unanimously,” he said.

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