What Is Urban Governance?

India has 7,900 cities across 30 states and union territories. Out of these, 294 are classified as municipal corporations with 460 million Indians living in them. This number is expected to grow to 590 million citizens by the year 2030.

Our urban governance systems, however, have not evolved to support this growth. 65% of cities do not have a proper solid waste management system, 30% do not have drinking water, 88% do not have sewer systems.

Present challenges

Whether it is Chennai or Mumbai or Bengaluru, we see similar problems in all major cities.
These problems are rooted in urban governance delivery and cover areas like urban flooding, traffic congestion, disappearing lakes, and rise in pollution.
It’s clear that India’s cities do not have a hundred thousand different problems – they have the same set of problems repeated a thousand times. Thus a reproducible systemic change is what is required to address these.

Our solution

We believe that “city-systems” – the urban governance and institutional systems – need to evolve to address these complex issues and that has been our focus for the last 20 years.

Urban Governance is a vast subject and we work on many aspects of it, and in multiple dimensions – in terms of legislation, programs and civic participation.

Our main focus areas  

To fulfil our vision we focus on the following aspects of governance in the urban context.

•  Empowerment of city governments, city officials and elected representatives.
• Promoting sustainable forums for citizen participation in local governance.
• Root cause analysis of municipal staff shortages and strengthening.
• Transparency in public finances.

Benchmarking Good Governance

Janaagraha publishes the Annual Survey of India’s Cities (ASICS) report which assesses the state of urban governance across India. We work on research and advocacy related to various central and state laws and work at the grassroot level with citizens in various cities.