Give the mayor real power to make city life better

Illustration: TBS

In 1991-95, when Khaleda Zia was prime minister and Sheikh Hasina was in the opposition, you might remember the mayoral election in which Awami League's Mohiuudin Chowdhury from Chattogram and Mohammad Hanif from Dhaka were elected. 

At that point I spoke to Sheikh Hasina that this is the first time the Awami League is being represented in senior positions through an electoral process and it is very important that they should prove themselves in terms of the quality of governance which they can bring about. Because this will then be relevant to projecting yourself in the forthcoming national elections where you can say that you administered Dhaka metropolitan city as efficiently as it should be. 

The Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), immediately after that election, constituted a policy dialogue in which we invited the four mayors to sit with the then Minister for Local Government Salam Talukder to show that he has now got four elected members of the major cities in the country and how he can empower them and recreate the structures for municipal government to actually get them to do their jobs. 

And of course, when we were investigating the background information for preparing the working papers, we then found that actually there was no such frame that gives local or municipal government any real power or authority. 

I think at the moment, the main power of the Dhaka city mayors, if I am not mistaken, is to eradicate mosquitoes, which we do not think they are doing too well. And [another responsibility] is to keep the streets clean; I do not know what we are getting on that front. 

But for all the other areas which are associated with the municipal government are outside their control, so that the management of Dhaka city or the governance of Dhaka city is in a state of bureaucratic anarchy — that is the only word which comes to my mind — because of the conflicting jurisdictions that exist from the Ministry of Local Government, which appoints the employees of the municipal authority. 

So the responsibilities and accountability of the people who work for the municipal government actually originate with the ministry of local government. And even the elected mayors can be ruled at will by the ministry of local government. So the minimum qualifications for exercising power, having responsibility and control over all the elements that affect the quality of life in Dhaka are outside the control of the mayors. 

The mayors' problems have been further complicated by the bifurcation of Dhaka which now assumes that mosquitoes will need a visa to go from Dhaka North to Dhaka South. It created a dual authority to administer a completely integrated city. 

In this circumstance, one of the first issues you will have to address when you are addressing the problems of urbanisation is to create an administrative structure which will in fact vest power in the hands of the chief administrator, which could be the mayor, who has integrated control over what happens in the city. 

And if you want a role model, you have seen the power of the mayor of New York, who controls everything from the police, the administration of water works, the administration of sewerage, the transport system — all are within his direct jurisdiction. He is really a powerful person who has the authority to look after his city. No such power exists here. 

One of the main sources of urbanisation's problems is constructing buildings and infrastructures only to provide housing opportunities for bureaucrats and the professional middle class, and also for low-income people. 

The problem was that the Public Works ministry's idea was to just put up buildings — the concept of serving the whole community in the area with shared responsibilities for schooling, for health care, for municipal maintenance, for transport registration was completely outside the domain of the work psychology of the ministry (during the initial years of Bangladesh). 

So whatever structures you built, degenerated into fragile slum-like conditions with very poor maintenance and law and order problems in that particular area. Many of you who are old enough may remember the degeneration of Azimpur Colony under that sort of planning regime. The notion of works ministry was works, and the sociology and architecture which are all integral to the planning process, were not there. 

I remember that my colleague (in the first Planning Commission of Bangladesh) Anisur Rahman, wrote a note which he sent to Bangabandhu stating that all ministers and officials should have their cars withdrawn, and they should come to walk on bicycles. 

What we did was to make sure in the planning commission that no investment from the government budget would be made in purchasing new cars. You now see one of the first things which is done is the 24-hour air-conditioned SUVs for new ministers. In fact we have now become an SUV country. When Bangabandhu was the prime minister, he used to ride to office in a 1300cc Toyota. 

If you want to know where the 50% of the problems of Dhaka city originate, it is allowing the city to be populated with not just SUVs, but Rolls Royces and BMWs.  

Each difficulty originates from certain structural problems which need to be addressed if you want to address the problems of urbanisation. Problems identified were discussed even in the Pakistan era, appeared in the country's first five-year plan and also shared in the documents of the task force we set up in 1991. All those problems have now multiplied many times over. 

Most important of them is an ideological issue. The planning is essentially a subordinate idea, now being overtaken more rapidly in the urban development sector by the market. So the tyranny of market forces has now become the major determinant of the trends in urbanisation and land use, and the problems which arise from these.

When you are travelling outside Dhaka, when you cross the Padma Bridge — one of our prides and achievements for which we should complement the prime minister — when you go from Dhaka up to Bhanga, you will notice along the sides of the road there are signboards on agricultural lands with different development projects, promising to set up estates and inviting people to come in and buy plots over there. 

This trend has already manifested across the bridge over the Buriganga, in Keraniganj, which itself has become a metropolitan centre and an extension of Dhaka. In the same way you will see, if you are travelling up to Savar and to Aricha, that all that land has now become urbanised. So metropolitan Dhaka has now extended up to the Padma and the Jamuna. 

And where are the limits of urbanisation? This has to be addressed in a planned way. But what is really happening is that all is being dictated by the dynamic market forces. 

The second consequence which is driving market forces is the astronomical escalation of the price of land. The land in Bangladesh, as you are now observing, has become like gold. As there was a gold rush in the US, where they grabbed all areas where they could mine gold. Now there is a rush to grab land here, for which they will do anything — even shedding blood in order to grab land. 

This is leading to environmental problems in Dhaka. About 50 canals have virtually disappeared from Dhaka's landscape. These were part of Dhaka's drainage system and their complete eradication has basically created the problem we face today.

So in those circumstances you have to now decide how you are going to manage this in relation to the new political economy which is now really governing our society. New political economy prevails very far from the political economy envisioned by Bangabandhu — of an egalitarian justice-based society. 

Professor Rehman Sobhan. Sketch: TBS

[Abridged from the statement of CPD chair Professor Rehman Sobhan at the conference on 'Sustainable Urbanisation: Problems and Solutions' held in Dhaka on 13 January 2024].