Acknowledging the contribution of social infrastructure towards building up human capital, this article analyses the trend and pattern of social sector expenditure in India in the 2000s. Rhetorical commitment of successive Indian governments towards inclusive social development and poverty alleviation in the 2000s has not been backed up by adequate financial allocations and this has merely served to maintain the status quo on social sector spending. The new pattern of tax shares between the centre and states has resulted in higher inflow of 'untied fund' from the central government accompanied by lower allocations of 'tied fund'. Subsequently, states have not exhibited any definitive sign of using their newly accrued fiscal autonomy to prioritise social sector expenditure. Along with greater public investment for development of human resources, this article emphasises on the need for appropriate monitoring and evaluation framework, and change in the budget making policy with greater involvement of people directly affected by changes in public policies related to social sector.
This article attempts to understand the inclusion of citizens and other actors, the structure of incentives and accountability and service delivery outcomes in relation to participatory forms of urban governance in Indian cities. Under a decentralized set-up, the political nature and the poor attendance of people in participative forums seriously serve to undermine the constitutionally envisaged aim of ‘ deepening democracy’. New forms of participatory arrangements have been dominated by the middle classes and/or powerful local leaders, resulting in the disempowerment of poorer members of the communities concerned. Patronage politics were engraved in these new forms, where the targeted delivery of services yielded high dividends for the patrons. All these factors necessitate the effective engagement of the excluded and disadvantageous section of people with the policies, politics and processes of participatory governance in Indian cities.
This article discusses the problems and prospects of provision of public services under decentralisation of the government. Traditionally, the provision of public services falls under the purview of a centralised planning process. But the system's failure to adjust public services to heterogeneous local needs results in inadequate provisioning and improper maintenance of these services. Of late, decentralisation has been hailed as an alternative to take care of the service delivery problems. One of the major promises of decentralisation is that it brings popular participation and accountability to local governance, and therefore, makes local government more responsive to citizens' desires and more effective in delivering services. The causal chain of decentralisation leading to greater citizen participation and voice and the resultant increase in accountability has been questioned both on theoretical and empirical grounds. A review of available empirical evidence also suggests that the success of decentralisation depends very much on the 'type/form' of the process itself. The real challenge is, therefore, to design an appropriate form of decentralisation that would help to realise the promised benefits of decentralisation.
This article attempts to understand state practices of restructuring of urban space and modes of governance, the role and strategies of the different actors involved and their participatory implications related to neoliberal urban transformation in Indian cities. Intergovernmental competition and inter-party conflict have constrained India’s attempts towards ‘state rescaling’, marked by incomplete devolution of authority and resources to the cities. In contrast to decentralization, a new networked form of local governance restructures and shifts the authority and resources from the municipality to the private sector, civil society groups or other agencies or branches within governments. These forms have institutionalized highly insulated and discretionary processes of decision-making to serve interest and priorities of upper-and middle-class population. Powers of the municipal officials and elected representatives have been weakened. Such political discursive processes and practices have rendered urban poor and their interests invisible within transformative cities. All these necessitate grounded deeper evaluations of such policies that are celebrated as technically sound and efficient or promote ‘good governance’.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.