The Seventy-Fourth Constitutional Amendment, enacted in 1992, granted constitutional status to municipalities, requiring States to entrust them with all necessary powers, functions and responsibilities, so that the municipalities could function as effective institutions of local self-government. Pursuant to the Amendment, all States passed their own Municipal Acts, specifying the structure and composition of Urban Local Bodies, their powers and functions, their administration, and finances, hoping that democratically elected local bodies would ensure clean and liveable, urban areas.

However, this has not happened, even in metropolises, because of serious deficiencies in implementation. The CAG in its 2024 report titled “Compendium of Performance Audits on the Implementation of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act, 1992: Landscape across India” studied 393 Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) across 18 states, catering to 24.1 crore residents. They noticed several shortcomings; for example, only four of the eighteen functions that should have been devolved, had been completely devolved, only 29 per cent of municipal expenditure was on programmatic and developmental work, and on average 37 per cent posts were vacant.

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Finances of ULBs were in a sorry state; there was a 42 per cent gap between their resources and expenditure, only 56 per cent of property tax demands had been collected, and ULBs could generate only 32 per cent of their revenue, with 68 per cent being transfers from the Union and State governments – putting them at the mercy of the Government, a situation that was sought to be avoided by the 74th Amendment. The public has suffered immensely because of the failure of municipalities to discharge their essential functions, with the national capital Delhi being a prime example. Every winter, the air quality index of Delhi deteriorates to ‘severe’ on most days and occasionally crosses 400 to be classified as ‘hazardous.’

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The problem was flagged in 1985 when environmentalist M.C Mehta filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court, claiming that existing environmental laws obliged the government to reduce air pollution. Remedial measures ordered by the Supreme Court, like conversion of all government vehicles, buses and autos plying in Delhi to compressed natural gas (CNG) brought down air pollution to acceptable levels. However, newer........

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