Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation

Exploring the Possibilities for Capacity Building

On Lack of Vision Statement

A detailed examination of the document named ‘Mission Statement and Guidelines’ pertaining to AMRUT draws my immediate attention to the lack of vision statement anywhere in the document. I am not sure whether I am wrong in expecting the vision statement in a document which has been explicitly named as a ‘Mission Statement’ but since my fundamental area of focus here is on the topic of capacity building I find it essential to have a vision statement which can actually help multiple stakeholders to work coherently to achieve the goals of the AMRUT.

Based on my experience and observation I consider it to be a natural human tendency to draw a vision for our individual lives by looking at successful persons around us. We find abundance of literature and media content on prominent movie actors, sports persons, scientists and politicians to ignite our aspirations. I see the same pattern here in this context when we are only looking at cities that are thriving and which have been fairly successful in meeting the challenges of urbanisation like Singapore, Tokyo or New York which gets a mention in the AMRUT document. Certainly they offer us great lessons but these lessons can only become much more meaningful and complete if we also take time to look at cities that have failed. The recent example for one such city is Detroit. Without going into the details of what led to the failure of Detroit I will jump into the question of how I see the Urban space. My intention is to draw ourselves into thinking the unconventional way for capturing the complete picture.

Urban space as a true embodiment of the human complexity

I see Urban space as a true embodiment of the human complexity. Unlike urban, rural space offers limited scope for nurturing the diverse capabilities and interests of Human Being. Urban space brings together people from diverse cultures to thrive together in harmony with each other. All this is aided further by the wide range of avenues opened up as a result of the advances in the information, communication and transportation technology. Most failed cities are victims of either flight of the capital or disintegration of the societies unable accommodate diversity. Hence if we are looking to transform a city that is sustainable in the long run; our vision should go beyond infrastructure. We need a vision for the city that is truly global and all inclusive in its nature. It should be a kind of city where people from across the geographies and cultures show eagerness to come here, to live here, to work, to invest and to lend their expertise in building the city further. Mere focus on infrastructure without tying it to such a vision will see the consequences like for instance the flight of textile industries from India to Bangladesh and elsewhere whenever there is an opportunity to lower the operational costs and maximise the profits. In such cases cases it is the other aspects of the city that will help retain the industries and investment. The point that I would like to drive home here is that building a city is more than just efficient infrastructure and this has deep implications for how we will go about capacity building of Institutions and personnel who have stake in implementing AMRUT.  This will further help in minimising the cost as a result of foresight brought in during planning and implementation itself.

Essential components of Capacity Building

The essential component of the capacity building  of Institutions and personnel implementing AMRUT should involve sensitising and educating them about the stereotypes with regard to particular race, gender, age, language, religion, ethnicity, region, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, social status etc. After all who wants to be in a city where everyday there is one or the other protest? Who wants to work in a city which has been labelled as a rape capital  or a capital of communal violence? Who wants to live or invest in a society where crime rate has spiked due to income inequality or poverty? Corruption and discrimination in the provision of many public services arise as a result of entrenched stereotypes held by the personnel regarding particular caste, religion, language etc. Further rise of ghettos of minorities and poor in the city with insufficient infrastructure actually are long term result of such stereotypes and neglect. Proactive, successful and effective implementation of ‘E- Municipality as a Service’ mentioned in the action plan of AMRUT will be directly linked to the heightened awareness about such stereotypes amongst the personnel. Further most of these provisions of e-services has to be in multiple languages or at least in three languages. Here I see lot of scope for tying up with the local educational institutions for the translation work. For students interning to translate; it is also a great learning opportunity to familiarise themselves with the challenges of public administration. Another important element that I see in E-MAAS is the provision of online grievance redressal mechanism. While the provision of online grievance redressal mechanism is a very significant step in increasing transparency and accountability in the administrative machinery; most often it fails due to sheer volume of grievances received and the lack of specific personnel to deal with it. In such a case Urban bodies instead of dealing with individual cases should welcome universities to do an in-depth study of the grievances who can pick up the nature and patterns from the thousands of grievances to inform the civic bodies in a better manner. This will serve the mutual interests of both civic bodies by equipping them with evidence and our universities by aligning their academics to actual social problems.

Initiatives to have websites for urban local bodies , periodical publication of e-newsletter are all welcome steps which will serve to inform the citizens effectively on the work done. Capacity building in such cases needs to focus on training the personnel to monitor and to keep the website up to date with accurate information. True manner of realising the Digital India Initiative in this context is through aiming for proactive disclosure of all the information related to the work of civic bodies which will help citizens to assess the performance and to play an effective vigilante role.  The extent of transparency and accountability will be the actual benchmark for the quality of services delivered.

The next essential component that I would like to stress with regard to the capacity building of Urban bodies and its personnel is the principle of lifelong learning. For Example on 14th October 2015 roughly around 8 lakh pharmacists in India went on strike to protest against the national government’s move to regularise the online sale of medicines ( Daily Mail, 2015). Then there were violent protests across the world against the online taxi aggregators like Ola and Uber by traditional taxi service providers. Simultaneously on the other hand there were research studies which were coming out with a long list of endangered jobs which included taxi drivers, factory workers, news reporters, farmers, clerks etc which had the heavy risk of automation. Even the most aspired profession by youngsters in India like certified chartered accountant was revealed to have heavy risk of automation. Science and Technology is acting as a powerful agent in reducing the middlemen between producers and consumers. When compared to activities like construction of dams, thermal power plants or mining the number of people being displaced from traditional occupations or jobs as a result of evolving technology is much larger. On the positive side reduction in intermediaries in the supply chain will considerably bring down the cost of medicines and other 'goods and services' given the condition that there is no monopoly. While on the negative side it will continue to displace large number of people from traditional occupations. It is also a formidable challenge for our nation which has now embarked on a 'Digital India' initiative. The whole world will be curiously looking forward to see how we are going to tackle issues arising from technology in the development of a Nation.  

In this context Personnel involved in government services are generally insulated from such risks of losing job due to lack of efforts to update their skills. On the other hand it becomes their responsibility to put in efforts to perpetually learn new skills to do their job efficiently. Here there is multitude of scope for capacity building of the personnel. They need to be introduced to new and better ways of doing their job with the help of technology. Every service needs to be coupled with its Geographical Information. For instance along with the online grievance if the geographical information is also captured it becomes easier to analyse and effectively deal with the problem at a very large scale. This enables to view the geographical distribution of various grievances or even lack of services and to respond quickly based on the degree and scale of the problem. Further geographical information has to be captured, collated and analysed with respect to each and every provision of the services made by the Urban Body. Planning and implementation based on such large scale data holds the key to success be it sanitation, water supply or even collection of taxes.

Peer networking, focus group discussions and visits to corporates moderated by domain experts will stimulate the personnel to seek and arrive at better ways of doing their job.This should be coupled with familiarisation of the potential of ICT in streamlining various services. There is also immense potential in collaborating with private sector. Like for instance collaborating with online taxi aggregators to come up with a similar solution for public transport system where the commuters can have the accurate information of the arrival and departure of the nearby buses along with online payment options will make the system demand driven while also plugging the loopholes wherever there is scope for the revenue loss. The same kind of ICT applications hold significant potential in the area of Health. For instance if we come up with the system of real time updation of information related to nature of illness reported at hospitals across the city it becomes so easy to ensure the availability of essential medicines and also to contain the spread of epidemics. The same applies to power transmission, water distribution , waste segregation etc where integration of ICT will drastically reduced the loss of revenue and improve the monitoring of the efficacy of the work undertaken. Integration of ICT at every level of administrative machinery in every department is an imminent and non negotiable task. The potential it holds towards improving the quality of our life is obvious. All that we need to do towards capacity building is to identify the islands of innovation here and there and facilitate a platform to bring them together to work towards finding innovative solutions.

Learning to appreciating domain expertise

Another essential component in the capacity building of the urban institutions and personnel is to  make them appreciate the value of domain expertise. The discipline of management offers a kind of expertise whereas the discipline of technology offers another. Each has its own value for the holistic functioning of the urban body. Seeking and building the collaboration with the domain experts in the area of science, technology, management, social sciences, jurisdiction etc brings in quality and efficiency in the functioning of urban bodies.

Government machineries need not end up doing everything. They need to focus only on the areas that are most neglected. Many things can be achieved by educating the masses and changing their behaviour. Here we need to employ behavioural psychologists to come up with innovative ideas to reform the behaviour and beliefs of the masses. For instance a simple research into housing industry gives us an idea about the huge adherence to Vaastu Shastra. People willingly spend lot of money just to make their living spaces Vaastu compliant. Here we need to organise campaigns that challenge the dominant and traditional mindset. Why is that none of the Vaastu pandit does not even delve into the issue of rain water harvesting? Why don’t they speak of making our living spaces energy efficient? Why don’t they educate the masses on efficient and scientific management of waste?. The guidelines in the AMRUT suggest of giving tax rebate for those going for green building but it is not just the monetary incentives that will motivate people to comply with the laws. They need to be convinced of the fact that for a sustainable urban space we need to minimise its negative impact on environment.

Prerequisites for any capacity building or training of Individuals

One of significant indicator of superior professionalism is when the demand for training is coming  from the department personnel itself. Better employment status or promotion has to be linked to higher professionalism exhibited. Unlike the government employees the ones working in the private  sector proactively indulge in updating their existing knowledge , learning new skill sets even if it means self financing. This is to emphasise that capacity building needs both structural reforms in the organisation of the institutions and also facilitating the training of the individuals. The educational universities has to be funded and allowed to study the functioning of the government departments to push evidence based structural reforms in the organisation of the urban bodies.  

The individual workshops, seminars or public lectures organised has to be documented and video recorded to be uploaded for access to anyone including citizens. The participants should be motivated to give their feedback as comments under such videos. This makes it possible to carry the impact of such workshops beyond the specific set of people. This also helps ensure the validity of the training programmes and offers lot of scope for improvisation based on the feedback from the diverse set of people. Further the focus group discussions should be carried forward to online forums. Apart from planning the training programmes systematically step by step like the need analysis, curriculum design and impact assessment the elements of transparency like video documenting the workshops, seminars etc has to be simultaneously given enough priority. This will help avoid the redundancy that might creep into the capacity building programmes at any time.