This is a brief discussion to draw attention to the citizens’ role in environmental issues. My basic assumption is that environmental issues are raised by human intervention. Therefore, the question that we address is “how do we regulate this intervention?” I shall discuss these briefly in the following sections.
1. The background of idealism.
2. The retarding years
3. The new horizon
4. The TCP Act of Karnataka
5. Comprehensive plans and town planning schemes
6. Judicial remedy
7. Assessing the planning system
The background of
idealism
In the early days of formation after Independence we resolved to make “planned intervention” as a way of life. Much of our governmental organization towards development reflects this mode. The 1950’s were the heydays of experiments in planning. The Community Development pilot projects were pursued in those years.
The Balwantrai Mehta Committee and the Asoka Mehta Committee followed these. They pioneered the legislation known as “the Democratic decentralization acts of 1958-60”. These laws were given as models by the Union Government and adapted by the states as legislative acts to suit local conditions. They dealt essentially with the organization for development planning in rural communities and Panchayati Raj. They created a lot of enthusiasm and participation in local development and governance in rural areas throughout the nation.
Parallel to these, a model Town and Country Planning Act was formulated by the Town and Country Planning Organization [TCPO] of the Government of India. This was also adapted by the various state legislatures to suit their traditions and local conditions.
These Acts brought in a lot of idealism and democratic orientation by way of providing primacy to the citizen in the mechanism and choice of intervention in the environment. Many states and regions did develop a great deal of enthusiasm during this period and did implement decentralization. This era achieved a measure participatory democracy in the rural areas through the CD and National Extension projects. It also achieved a measure of closing the distance between the executive bureaucrat and the rural population.
The maximum achievement can be perceived in the areas of agriculture, health, education and welfare. Thus, the intervention mechanisms and response of the citizens in these areas were altered substantially.
The retarding years
We need remember two important aspects beginning the latter half of the ‘Sixties which gathered momentum counter to the above idealism. One was the expansion of the bureaucracy; the other was the movement toward centralization of authority and decision-making mechanisms in general. Without appearing to be critical, this was the Indira Gandhi era of political and bureaucratic evolution.
India inherited from the Victorian days two kinds of doctrines regarding local governance and development. These were by two Viceroys who influenced local government organizations in this country a great deal. They were Ripon and Mayo. Ripon‘s doctrine believed in popular participation even at the expense of temporal inefficiency. He believed that in the long run the people must learn to govern themselves; and, that the bureaucracy can only help in the organized effort in a professional way. To that extent he urged the bureaucracy to be more responsive than being merely neutral and efficient.
Mayo emphasized the opposite. He urged the bureaucracy to provide services with neutral efficiency and not waste the empire’s resources. He was less concerned about the popular participation as such allowing that social apathy to development is also a natural attitude. The government must be benign to such vagaries. This debate between the doctrinal positions continues to this day in the bureaucracy as well as the political leadership in India.
The Mayo doctrine seemed to have taken over after the mid-1960s. The states created many agencies, special districts, public enterprises and development authorities, which took away many of the roles and functions of the local governments. In addition, many of the local governments were superseded by the states. Elections were not held for local councils in many states for more than decade.
These years [decades] also witnessed political and bureaucratic patronage on the rise in appointments, granting of contracts for public works and the like. As a result, popular participation became restricted to state and national elections.
These trends eroded all the idealism of the ‘Fifties and early ‘Sixties about democratic decentralization. One major handicap of these decades was the absence any legal backing to the local government. Until the Amendments 73 and 74 to the Constitution of India, the local government was considered a creation of the state legislature and therefore an “arm of the state” government.
The new horizon
The 73rd and 74th Amendments have changed that condition. Now the local governments, rural and urban are given Constitutional status. However, old habits die hard. Moreover, most of the states have done their best to keep the local government under their control. They have done this through several methods, such as, the following:
1. Not providing adequate funds for local government.
2. Exercising bureaucratic control over the local government budget and development efforts.
3. Insisting on seconding state bureaucrats to local governments.
4. Creating state agencies to usurp the legitimate functions of the local government.
5. Prohibiting and inhibiting the local governments from developing professional competence in their areas of concern.
6. Keeping the emoluments of the local government employees lower than their equivalents in the state service cadres.
7. Treating the 11th and 12th Schedules of the Constitutional Amendments as not legally enforceable items {non-mandatory items]
8. Threatening the local governments with “dissolution” as opposed to the old “superseding”.
9. Extending various forms of political and bureaucratic patronage to keep the local government under control.
10. Packing the various committees of planning and development with nominees of the state and neglecting representatives of citizens and citizen interests.
In general, the states [particularly, Karnataka among them] have adopted the well-worn “non-congruent” models of decision-making. Wherever there is a committee to be formed its interest constituency is not recognized. But ex-officio members are packed into the same along with patronage nominees. This causes institutionalized alienation of the citizens.
The TCP Act of
Karnataka
We must look at the working of the Town and Country Planning Act in the above perspective. We will look at a few salient provisions of the Act. It applies, as legislated, to all new developments that have the impact of intervention in the existing environment. It applies to all planned/organized community activities except agriculture, forestry and related conservation efforts. Thus the focus is on the population and its interaction with the environment regardless of whether the government or private enterprise effects the intervention.
The idiom of planned intervention and its regulatory needs/inducements are derived from the Police Power and the Eminent Domain doctrines. In the exercise of the police power, the plan as evolved by the community provides the basis for an objective identification of the public interest. Thus, its implementation can be regulated by the police power of the state.
While establishing the public interest, the Act calls for the distribution of the initiatives in planning widely among the political leadership, the professional bureaucracy and the citizens concerned and citizenry at large. The Act does not differentiate among the three groups in terms of importance but delineates their functional role clearly.
In a Rousseauvian idiom of the “common will” and the “will of all” the Act allows the goals of the plans to be initiated from any quarter as in common interest. However, the criteria for intervention are to be decided by the value of the people who receive the impact. Here we may perceive the “will of all” and how it may be measured.
In general, Indian bureaucrats confuse between standards and yardsticks of decision-making as against criteria, especially in cases of environmental decisions. Standards may be common and uniform as exemplified by the Bureau of Indian Standards, ISI certification and the like. A criterion by definition comes from the same root as “critical” meaning the “true condition” on the ground. Thus, criteria are observed, felt and measured on the field of intervention. It is impossible to measure criteria except on the field of intervention. Often, the present attitude results in the neglect of including the citizens’ feel and response to plans and public programmes.
The citizens’ role in planning as envisaged in the Act has not been forthcoming. One of the reasons is that the citizens are not informed and are not conscious about these. We still lack an informed public.
The other reasons derive from the historical conditions described earlier. In addition, the political leadership and the elite bureaucracy of the Administrative Service keep the technical bureaucracy of planners, engineers, architects and other professional personnel in a sub-ordinate condition. The Administrative Service people, at their best, exercise what has been described as “neutral competence” in Public Administration literature. The sub-ordinate bureaucracy, in turn, is not in a position to exercise “responsive competence” in the interface with the public.
Over the years, TCP Act has been amended and interpreted to suit the political trends mentioned earlier. As a result, it has come to be used more as an urban administration instrument than as a planning instrument. Planners are working more at issuing building permits, sanctioning lay-outs and collecting licence fees than in planning and development formulations and regulatory items. This is a perversion and corruption of the cadre’s goals and the TCP Act itself.
Comprehensive Plans
& Town Planning Schemes
There are two modes of planning defined in the Act. These two cover most of the activities of public intervention in the environment whether by public initiative or private initiative. One deals with making Comprehensive plans for the entire community or urban area. The second deals with smaller projects that deal with specifics such as the widening of the roads, creating or improving a water body, developing a park or new gardens, widening sidewalks, making pathways for children to walk to school, creating better traffic junctions, cross-overs, fly overs, regulating the parking of vehicles, freight yards, warehouses, terminals and the like.
All these and other interventions, either partial or wholesome, are included in the purview of the Act. The Act specifies a mandatory process with citizen inputs at several stages from the initiation and notification of intention to formulation and finalization and public evaluation. In none of these stages, over the decades [in Bangalore], the planning bureaucracy or other authority of the government has followed the law to obtain the citizens’ criteria.
Within the last decade a few hearings were held sporadically in Mangalore, Mysore and in Bangalore on a few items, such as, the ELRTS project due to pressure from NGOs. But they were not professional efforts. They were more PR type meetings. Some ended bitterly with violence on some of the NGO coordinators.
Meanwhile, the responsibility for planning has also been taken away in regard to transportation and traffic items and placed in special police department cell. Some dozens of road improvement and crossing schemes are being implemented without the process specified in the TCP Act. The attitude of the government bureaucrats is like, “if you are interested… you may contact the office concerned and look at the details”.
Anyone, who has been to the BDA or the BMRDA to look at the plans, will know how difficult it is to gain access. Secondly, if one’ neighbourhood is going to be affected by the construction of a pipeline, cross over, or other entity why should he/she be subjected to this travel requirement of going to the office of the agency concerned and ask for a look into the documents. All this is contrary to the Act’s mandatory requirements of the process.
Judicial Remedy
Other than the long-term evolution through education, the only course of action available to the citizen is judicial remedy. To what extent an ordinary citizen can seek judicial remedy is any body’s guess. It is expensive. A cursory look at the number cases heard by the courts in Karnataka reveals that the most of the petitioners were either rich people or NGOs who were supported by charitable foundations.
Can smaller courts take on these kinds of cases? Many of these cases are not really of a Constitutional nature. They are grievances of a local nature and concerned with the local public space.
One of the suggestions in the recent past has been that of creating special benches in the courts, such as, an environmental bench.
Another option is that of a tribunal type commission to deal with all these cases and even issues of planning and development. These would be similar to the TRAI or the Power Utility Commissions established in some states. They make judicial and appellate decisions in regard to the specific utility.
In the American and British practice many regions and counties and cities are now making use of a Planning Commission. The Commissioners like a tribunal are elected and/or appointed according to certain guidelines. The Commissioners themselves do not make the plans or schemes. The plans and schemes are made by the Planning Departments [the bureaucracy] and/or by private enterprise depending on the nature of the initiative. The plans go through the process of formulation; the Planning Commission holds a judicial form of hearing on the plan’s pros and cons with the public participation. In this system, The Planning Commission hears the lay people as well as the advocate planners who may provide the alternatives. In some jurisdictions the advocate planners are also financed by the government to provide the a fortiori. This kind of a system might enhance the local interest and capability. At the same time might provide a judicial approach to decision-making. This might help keep most of the disputes due to intervention resolved locally.
Assessing the
planning system
I propose here some measure to assess the plans. Within the profession we assess any plan or public programme by the clientele served. The population eligible to participate and benefit from a plan or programme is termed the client population. The number of persons actually participating and benefiting is termed the clients of the programme. The ratio of the actual clients to the client population is an index of participation. This index of participation is good assessment in local plans as the people are immediate. Generally, electoral participation in this country varies from 45 % to 75 % of the electorate. If we can achieve that range in the participation index, it would be a great day.
Secondly, we can also assess the competence extended in the planning system. These would include both neutral and responsive competence. Neutral competence is likely to be stable in a bureaucracy given the culture and a period of time. Responsive competence will vary with the effort put in to extend the services and induce a response among the citizens. It would also vary with the level of education and information and concern of the citizens. The aim is to elicit a rational response and a rational form of demands. Toward this the bureaucracy ought to be trained and systems organized. Similar to the participation index, we may also develop a Competence Index. This may be a ratio of the responsive competence score to that of the neutral competence score. As neutral competence is likely to remain steady given the culture and period of time it would be a good denominator. The Competence Index will certainly be difficult to formulate and measure. It will not be impossible. It will be a complex quality; its component traits can be identified even as specific to geographic scales of formation of communities, such as, the neighbourhood, the community, the town, the city and the region.
Summary
An idealist era of planned intervention began in the 1950s. It resulted in democratic decentralization acts between 1958 and 1960. The movement produced a good amount of citizen participation in rural areas.
The urban areas tried developing similar legislation in the form of the Town and Country Planning Act. I the second half of the 1960s these were, seemingly, given a given a push by the formation of the metropolitan and urban development agencies and several other special agencies. These were created as arms of the state with ex-ooficio representation to local governments.
The local governments became neglected due to usurpation of their functions by the special agencies of the state. Even legally, the local governments had not permanent status. They were considered as creation s of the state governments and remained at their mercy. It was the death of local governments in real terms.
The 73rd and the 74th Amendments changed this position and provided a constitutional status to the local government. Most states and bureaucracies have been reluctant to implement the Constitutional provisions. They provide minimum ritual support to the local councils and deprive them of the resources, organization and equipment needed to become autonomous.
This leaves the citizen at the receiving end and in a non-responsive corner, especially, in regard to causes and cases of environmental intervention. The judicial remedy is out of reach for most people.
The judicial decision making mechanisms and organization can be brought down to local levels to deal with these issues. The options may vary from that of specialized courts to those of reorganized planning systems where planning decisions and local commissions will follow judicial forms of decision making. These arrangements would resolve most problems locally without a specific need to resort to courts of law.
In administrative systems, performance criteria may be measured by identifying neutral competence and responsive competence of the planning system. Thus, we may develop and implement an index of competence. In the planning systems, we may develop a similar index of participation that would identify the number of actual participants and beneficiaries of a plan in proportion to the legally eligible number of participants and beneficiaries.
These assessments might help improve the performance of the planned intervention.
Subbarayan Prasanna
Retd. Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore