India is getting richer every year, but its cities don’t seem to be getting any more livable. Not because the country is too poor, or because leaders lack ambition, but because urban citizens are starved of funds and deprived of representation. And the government’s in no hurry to fix it, even though people are dying as a result.

Mumbai’s skyline is dotted with opulent glass towers, and it calls itself India’s commercial capital. The civic body, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, is the country’s richest. And yet residents have lived for years with no say in how their city was being run. When it finally held local polls in January, it was after a gap of nearly a decade.

The equivalent city authority in Bengaluru, home to world-beating tech companies, hasn’t allowed people to vote for its leadership since 2015. It will hopefully happen later this year — only because the Supreme Court put its foot down recently. This carelessness about local polls is a widespread problem: Last year, the urban governance nonprofit Janaagraha estimated that 61% of urban governments in 17 of 28 states had their elections delayed.

© The Japan Times