Adapting Global Urban Good Practices to Solve Local Challenges

The Janaagraha model combines the roles of a think-tank, capacity-building organisation and a grassroots movement, which in most cities are split into separate organisations that struggle to coordinate efforts . . .

Kadugondanahalli is a scruffy suburb on Bangalore’s northern periphery and the main road cutting through it is dominated by petty shops and small-scale industries. It continues to suffer from an apparent lack of amenities, with a stagnant drain cutting across its centre, the main road rutted almost beyond repair and a fine layer of dust covering everything within a few feet of the street.
On an unusually cloudy and windy winter day in early December, I entered Kadugondanahalli to meet the Urban Reformer Ramesh Ramanathan.

When Ramesh Ramanathan returned to India’s IT capital, the once quiet city was in the throes of a tech-led explosion and Bangalore’s inadequate infrastructure was buckling under the strain.
He set up Janaagraha, with a Rs 2.5-crore fund injection from the Ramanathan Foundation and soon got 22 corporators to agree to their suggestions on how their funds could be used optimally. Ramanathan even set up Public Record of Operations Finance (PROOF), a right to information campaign to support this purpose. Janaagraha consistently delivers practical proposals and results, drawing on the best of urban practice around the world and adapts it to uniquely local challenges. The urban development field is burdened by dominant logics, lingering ideologies, competing strategies and professional biases. Janaagraha aims to generate fresh solutions through a truly inter-disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach, and it promotes its solutions boldly with a spirit of entrepreneurship.
Since those early super-charged days, several changes have taken place both on the ground in the city’s administration and state politics. An apparent lack of political will has left the once-promising BATF moribund and compelled Ramanathan to re-examine his plans.

Ramanathan has tried to move Janaagraha onto the next stage of evolution, focussing in his words now on building “the how” of urban administration. “We need to empower local administration; city municipalities are today disempowered and emasculated; cities are great to build political careers,” says Ramanathan.
He may have a point; spending by city agencies account for barely 2 per cent of public expenditure in the country, compared to around 40 per cent in China; property tax collection here is just over 30 per cent, so in a city like Bangalore, with around 12 lakh properties, around 4 lakh pay their dues.
The expertise of working with the local governance of perhaps India’s most poorly managed city has come in handy for Ramanathan. He has become a widely-respected figure in urban reform, being wooed by states across the country (like the Rajasthan Government) as well as being handpicked to help run the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) as its National Technical Advisor. “We were called by the CM of Rajasthan to overhaul the existing system and put in place an effective urban reform system in the state,” says Ramanathan.
Despite his modesty, Ramanathan has effected significant changes in the way the Rajasthan Government handles its urban areas. As the Principal Advisor for SURAJ (State Urban Agenda for Rajasthan) engineered by his team, city administrations will undertake no more than 10 civic initiatives at a time to keep project management manageable and also work on resolving deeper systemic issues in the state. “We are working on more complex technical issues related to setting up spatial data centres or GIS maps. These will take time,” says Ramanathan.

Like his early days with Janaagraha in Bangalore, where the movement did not just garner public support, but also created a stir in the state administration he admits that he faced expected resistance, which has only eased over the last few months. “It took time for them to warm to what we planned to achieve. There will always be critics; you can’t satisfy everyone all the time,” Ramanathan admits.
His verve and enthusiasm for what many consider a dead-end cause has won him several loyal (and high-profile) admirers. Biotech baroness Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw calls him an “urban reform pioneer” and credits him with entering an area few people would dare to tread. “Few people have the courage to work in these areas given the sheer lethargy of state administration, so you must admire him for willing to get his hands dirty,” Mazumdar-Shaw says.
Ramanathan is also central to the revision of the Municipalities Act, to try and provide a simpler, and more relevant legislation for urban bodies. “All these legislations are at least 50 or 60 years old and are legacy of British India. They are cumbersome and need to be updated for current reality,” he says.
From starting a movement to make Bangalore Municipality more accountable to its citizens, Janaagraha now wants to become a well-rounded national agency, focussing on providing a systemic and institutionalised voice for the citizens of India’s IT city. Ramanathan speaks of setting up urban self-governance units called area sabhas to try and make local governance more effective.
Then, Janaagraha has piloted a Parisara Mitra (friend of the environment) to more effectively manage solid waste. “The initial romantic notion of participation has given way to a more realistic notion of what our mission is about. We have moved from the why of participation to the how of participation and having rejected any autocratic structure, we have to make the democratic structure work for us,” says Ramanathan, who is also the Chairman of a microfinance NGO called Janalakshmi.
From being an organisation known for just its two founders, Ramanathan is trying to build Janaagraha into a self-sustaining outfit, but knows he has his task cut out. “Building Janaagraha is our No. 1 priority; we have invested in the organisation for the last five or six years, but let me tell you it’s much harder to build a viable not-for-profit enterprise than a for-profit venture. We have made some progress, but our set-up is far from ideal,” he explains. Ramanathan is keeping his fingers crossed.

-Courtesy: Rahul Sachitanand for Business Today