DISCRETIONARY URBAN DEVELOPMENT

One example of how such discretionary powers (of the state chief minister) can lead to uneven urban development in geographical locations of the same state is that of Gurugram and Faridabad

- Bibek Debroy, Amit Kapoor & Aditya Sinha

IN HIS SEMINAL BOOK Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services, Michael Lipsky extensively wrote about the discretionary powers of street-level bureaucrats. "The essence of street-level bureaucracies is that they require people to make decisions about others. Street-level bureaucrats have discretion because the nature of service provision calls for human judgment that cannot be programmed and for which machines cannot substitute". For Lipsky, the decisions made by these "over-burdened" bureaucrats were "ad-hoc policy adaptations that impacted people's lives". However, if one looks at the non-street level bureaucracy and, for that matter, the political executive in the state, the exercise of discretionary powers has not always been for good. Discretionary powers can sometimes be very detrimental to both the ease of doing business and the ease of living. Urbanisation in India has also been held hostage by discretionary powers, be they those of the street-level bureaucrats or the state government.

For instance, in the 1990s, the state government of Tamil Nadu created the Tamil Nadu Slum Clearance Board (TNSCB) to address the problem of slums in the state's capital, Chennai. The TNSCB had the discretionary powers to acquire land, demolish slums, and rehabilitate slum dwellers. However, as always, the discretionary powers were not exercised uniformly. Some slums were destroyed without proper provision of rehabilitation, and selective enforcement led to accusations of corruption and partiality. Many slum dwellers were displaced without adequate warning or compensation, and some became homeless as a result. We have explained in these pages earlier how states fail to notify something like census towns as urban. However, one often doesn't discuss the urgent need for land reforms.