The missing spotlight on urban local government elections

Urban local governments (ULGs) function as units of decentralised local self-governance, and are responsible for delivering civic services at the first mile, ensuring quality of life for citizens. The 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA) was introduced in 1992 to codify this role of ULGs. Over 30 years later, the objectives of this landmark amendment are yet to be realised. The ongoing discourse on simultaneous elections, popularly known as One Nation One Election (ONOE), is a unique opportunity to spotlight a basic requirement of local democracy, i.e., elections to ULGs — a consideration that has generally been absent in deliberations on the ONOE.

The 79th report of the Parliament Standing Committee on Law and Justice on the ‘Feasibility of Simultaneous Elections,’ submitted in 2015, while advocating simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies, was silent on elections to ULGs. A discussion paper (2017) by the NITI Aayog, on ‘Analysis of Simultaneous Elections’, kept ULGs out of its purview, arguing that the third-tier institutions are State subjects and that the sheer number of such institutions across the country makes it “impractical, and possibly impossible, to synchronise elections”. Similar reasoning is put forward in the 2018 draft report of the Law Commission of India on simultaneous elections. But in a refreshing departure, the High Level Committee (HLC) constituted by the Government of India to provide a road map for implementation of simultaneous elections, deliberated on local body elections and recommended synchronising them within 100 days of simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies.