Ask a resident of an Indian city who governs the city and the answer names a person who does not, in law, run it. The mayor cuts the ribbons, chairs the council and carries the blame for flooded streets and uncollected refuse. The administration that employs the engineers, signs the contracts, prepares the budget and answers for the water supply is headed by a Commissioner whom the city did not elect and cannot remove, because the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992, the provision everyone calls the 74th Amendment, constitutionalised the elected council and said nothing at all about the executive that serves it. That silence is the key to the whole design. The amendment made Indian cities democratic in composition and left them administered, as before, by the State.

This article is the pillar account of that amendment. It states what the amendment inserted into the Constitution, in the order the text itself runs: the three types of municipality and what decides which type a place receives, the composition of the council and the reservations inside it, the five-year term and the election discipline the courts have built on it, the wards committees, the permissive devolution clause and the eighteen functions of the Twelfth Schedule, and the two planning committees, one for the district and one for the metropolitan area, which are the amendment’s most original and least obeyed creations. It then confronts the two features that decide how the text works in practice: the appointed executive the amendment did not touch, and the layer of State parastatal bodies that performs municipal functions without being municipal at all. The field as a whole, rural and urban together, is mapped in the series guide to local government law in India, and this article stays inside the urban instrument.

The claim the article defends can be stated in one sentence. The city is elected and administered separately: the amendment made the council elected and left the executive with a State-appointed Commissioner, and it listed functions in a Schedule while leaving the parastatals that perform them untouched, so an Indian city has an elected body accountable to voters and an administration accountable to the State, and the two are joined only by whatever the State statute chooses to provide. Every section that follows is evidence for, or a qualification of, that sentence.

What city government was before the 74th Amendment

Municipal institutions in India are old, and their subordination is older than the Republic. A municipal corporation was set up at Madras in 1688, and the nineteenth century produced a succession of municipal Acts for the presidency towns and the smaller towns beyond them. Lord Ripon’s resolution of 1882 is conventionally treated as the founding statement of local self-government, because it argued that local bodies should be training grounds in political education and should carry a substantial elected element. The Government of India Act, 1919 made local self-government a transferred subject in the provinces, and the Government of India Act, 1935 carried it into provincial autonomy. None of this altered the underlying legal position: a municipality existed because a provincial, and later a State, statute created it, and it possessed the powers, the taxes and the tenure that the statute allowed, for exactly as long as the statute’s makers chose to let it live.

The Constitution of 1950 preserved that position without embarrassment. Local government sits in the State List of the Seventh Schedule, whose fifth entry covers the constitution and powers of municipal corporations, improvement trusts, district boards and other local authorities for the purpose of local self-government or village administration. The Directive Principles, in Article 40, directed the State to organise village panchayats and endow them with powers of self-government; they said nothing about municipalities at all. The urban local body therefore entered the Republic with no constitutional protection of any kind. Its elections, its term, its supersession and its finances were ordinary matters of State legislation, alterable by simple majority and administrable by notification.

What did city government look like before the 74th Amendment?

It rested entirely on State statutes, and in much of the country it barely existed in elected form. Councils were superseded for years at a stretch and run by administrators, elections were postponed without legal consequence, and municipalities survived as departments of the State government rather than as a tier of governance in their own right.

The working record matched the legal position. Across the States, municipal elections were irregular, councils were superseded and replaced by administrators for long periods, and the interval between one elected council and the next could stretch far beyond the term the statute prescribed, because nothing in the Constitution was breached by the delay. Municipal finance depended on State grants and on taxes the State permitted, and municipal functions were steadily withdrawn to State-level bodies: development authorities took over planning and land, water boards took over supply and sewerage, and the elected council was left with the functions nobody else wanted and the blame for all of them. The decades between independence and the reform produced growth in number without growth in standing. State legislation multiplied municipal corporations beyond the handful of presidency and provincial cities that had possessed them, extended municipal government to hundreds of smaller towns, and built the statutory apparatus of commissioners, standing committees and State directorates of municipal administration through which the system was run. What the apparatus never acquired was security. Each new corporation inherited the legal personality of its predecessors, a creature of statute holding delegated powers under State supervision, liable to modification and supersession at the pleasure of the legislature that made it. Municipal reform in this period therefore meant better statutes within an unchanged constitutional position, and the committees and commissions that examined urban government, from the Rural-Urban Relationship Committee of the nineteen sixties onwards, returned repeatedly to the same ceiling: no statute could protect a municipality against the next statute, and only the Constitution could give the third tier a floor that State politics could not remove. That ceiling is what the reformers of the nineteen eighties set out to break.

Reform attempts inside Parliament failed at the same hurdle. The Constitution (Sixty-fifth Amendment) Bill, 1989, the Nagarpalika Bill of the Rajiv Gandhi government, was passed by the Lok Sabha and defeated in the Rajya Sabha, as its rural companion had been, and the project of giving municipalities constitutional status lapsed with the government that proposed it.

The bills returned in 1991 under the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao, in a Parliament where the arithmetic had changed. The urban bill was passed by the Lok Sabha on 22 December 1992 and by the Rajya Sabha on 23 December 1992. Because the amendment touched matters on which the Constitution requires the concurrence of the States, it was ratified by the legislatures of not less than half the States, and it received the assent of the President on 20 April 1993. It came into force on 1 June 1993. Its formal name is the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992, the year in its title being the year of its passage rather than of its commencement, a distinction that examination questions exploit and that this article will observe throughout.

The shelter of Article 243ZF ran for one year, and within it every State enacted or amended municipal legislation to conform to the new Part: councils were reconstituted on the threefold pattern, reservation was written into the State Acts in the constitutional proportions, the State Election Commissions created for the panchayats took charge of municipal elections as well, and the first elections under the new dispensation were held across the States in the middle of the decade. The conformity exercise is worth pausing on, because it shows the amendment working exactly as designed and no further. What the Constitution commanded, the States did, promptly and almost completely, because existence, election and composition are matters a State can settle by a single amending Act. What the Constitution permitted, the States did in part, at leisure, or not at all, because functions, finances and functionaries are not settled by an Act alone but by the surrender of departments, budgets and cadres, which no deadline in Part IXA compelled. The pattern of the first five years is the pattern of the whole period since: complete compliance on the mandatory core, selective compliance on everything else.

Why the amendment took the shape it did

The shape of the 1992 settlement, mandatory elections and permissive powers, was not a drafting preference. It was the price of enactment, and the prehistory explains the price. The National Commission on Urbanisation, appointed in 1985 and chaired by the architect Charles Correa, reported in 1988 with a diagnosis that the debate has used ever since: urban local bodies had been reduced to insignificance by the withdrawal of their functions, the starvation of their finances and the suspension of their elections, and nothing short of constitutional status, regular elections and assured finance would restore them. The 1989 bills attempted to enact that diagnosis and fell in the Rajya Sabha, where the objection that proved fatal was federal in form: local government is a State subject, and a Parliament that prescribed the structure of municipalities from Delhi was accused of centralising in the name of decentralisation, of imposing on the States a uniformity their diverse urban conditions did not need. The objection was not frivolous, and the governments of several States held it in good faith.

The bills that returned in 1991 and passed in 1992 were drafted inside that objection. Where the subject was the existence and democratic constitution of the bodies, the amendment overrode the federal objection entirely, because the supersession record had discredited the claim that the States could be trusted with the timing of elections. Where the subject was power, the amendment deferred to the objection: functions, taxes and staffs stayed with the State legislatures, whose consent, expressed through ratification, the amendment needed and whose institutional interests the permissive clauses protected. Read the text with this history in mind and its two registers stop looking like inconsistency. The mandatory core is the set of propositions on which the States’ record was indefensible. The permissive remainder is the set of propositions on which the States’ consent had to be bought. Every later frustration with the amendment, the unelected executive, the untransferred functions, the missing metropolitan committees, is a frustration with a clause that was written permissively because the alternative in 1992 was not a stronger amendment but, as in 1989, no amendment at all.

The ratification the amendment required is the documentary proof of the bargain. A constitutional amendment of this character, trenching on the distribution of powers between the Union and the States, could not take effect on Parliament’s vote alone; the legislatures of not less than half the States had to ratify it, and they did, within months of the parliamentary passage, in numbers comfortably beyond the requirement. State legislatures were not ratifying their own dispossession. They were ratifying a settlement that constitutionalised the elections they had been postponing, which cost them embarrassment rather than power, and left in their hands the functions, finances, staff and executives through which power over cities is actually exercised. The speed of the ratification, against the background of a decade in which municipal elections had been the exception across much of the country, is the clearest contemporary evidence of where the amendment’s teeth were and were not understood to be.

The frame the amendment built: Part IXA

The amendment did two things of form and one thing of substance. In form, it inserted a new Part IXA, titled “The Municipalities”, running from Article 243P to Article 243ZG, immediately after the Part IX on panchayats that the companion Seventy-third Amendment had inserted, and it added a Twelfth Schedule of eighteen matters. In substance, it divided the government of municipalities into a mandatory core, which the Constitution itself fixes and no State legislature may dilute, and a permissive remainder, which the Constitution offers to the State legislature to accept, shape or ignore. Almost everything that is distinctive about Indian municipal government flows from where the line between those two zones was drawn.

The phrase the permissive provisions use deserves a sentence of its own, because it supplies the standard by which the whole Part is judged. Article 243W speaks of enabling municipalities to function as institutions of self-government. The Constitution does not use that phrase of Parliament or of the State legislatures, which are governments by direct constitutional grant; it uses it of the third tier as an aspiration the State legislature is invited to realise. Self-government in the phrase is not a courtesy title. It means a body that decides the ends of its own action within its allotted field, raises a substantial part of what it spends, and answers for the result to its own electorate. Measured against each element, election, decision and revenue, the distance between the invitation and the practice is the subject matter of the rest of this article.

The mandatory core is concerned with existence and composition. Municipalities of three types must be constituted. Their seats must be filled by direct election from wards. Reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women must follow the proportions the text prescribes. The term is five years, elections must be completed before the term expires or within six months of a dissolution, and the superintendence of municipal elections is vested in the State Election Commission. A District Planning Committee must be constituted in every State, and a Metropolitan Planning Committee in every metropolitan area. These propositions are in the Constitution, and a State Act that contradicts them fails to the extent of the contradiction.

The permissive remainder is concerned with power. What functions a municipality performs, what taxes it levies, what staff it commands and what executive directs that staff are matters the Constitution remits to the State legislature in the language of permission. Article 243W says the legislature may endow municipalities with the powers necessary to function as institutions of self-government. Article 243X says the legislature may authorise a municipality to levy specified taxes. The amendment thus constitutionalised the shell of municipal government, its existence, its elections and its composition, and left the substance of municipal power to the same State legislatures whose neglect had made the amendment necessary. That is not an accusation; it is the text, and the sections below follow it.

Article 243P supplies the definitions on which the Part runs. A metropolitan area is an area having a population of ten lakh or more, comprised in one or more districts and consisting of two or more municipalities or panchayats or other contiguous areas, specified by the Governor by public notification to be a metropolitan area for the purposes of the Part. A municipal area is the territorial area of a municipality as notified by the Governor. A municipality is an institution of self-government constituted under Article 243Q. Population means the population as ascertained at the last preceding census of which the relevant figures have been published, a definition that ties every threshold in the Part to published census figures rather than to executive estimates. Article 243ZF gave the existing State municipal laws a short shelter: provisions inconsistent with Part IXA continued in force until amended or repealed, or until one year from the commencement of the amendment, whichever was earlier, so the States had a defined interval in which to bring their statutes into conformity. Article 243ZB applies the Part to the Union territories with the adaptations the text specifies, and Article 243ZC keeps the Scheduled Areas and tribal areas referred to in Article 244 outside the Part unless Parliament extends it by law, and protects the functions of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council from anything in the Part.

The Union territory application shows what the Part looks like when the State legislature in the design is Parliament itself. In Delhi, the municipal corporation exists under the Delhi Municipal Corporation Act, 1957, a law of Parliament, because the territory’s local government has always been a Union responsibility exercised through its own statute. Parliament trifurcated the corporation into three bodies in 2012 and reunified it by amendment in 2022, decisions about the structure of a city’s government taken in the national legislature as a matter of ordinary law-making, which is constitutionally regular for a Union territory and politically unthinkable for a State capital. The contrast isolates the variable the whole Part turns on. Where the framing legislature is Parliament, municipal structure is an instrument of the framing power’s policy. Where it is a State legislature, the same is true, and the amendment’s settlement consists precisely in accepting that truth for everything except existence, election and composition.

Which State laws actually create and govern a municipal corporation?

A corporation exists because a State municipal statute says so, and the same statute fixes its wards, its taxation, its staff and its executive. The Constitution supplies the frame of Part IXA; the corporation’s working law is a State Act, which is why two corporations in different States can differ in almost every operational detail.

This distribution of labour between the constitutional text and the State statute is the single most useful thing a reader can carry into any municipal question. When a resident asks why the corporation cannot repair a road, set a charge or dismiss an official, the answer is almost never in the Constitution. It is in the State municipal Act, in a rule made under it, or in a notification of the State government, and the amendment’s design ensures that the trail leads there.

The article map of Part IXA

Because the Part is a complete code for its subject, its internal order is itself an argument, and a reader who holds the order holds the amendment. Article 243P defines the terms, including the metropolitan area and the census-based meaning of population. Article 243Q constitutes the three types of municipality and states the classifying factors and the industrial township exception. Article 243R composes the council, by direct election from wards, with the optional nominated and ex officio elements. Article 243S constitutes Wards Committees above the population threshold of three lakh. Article 243T reserves seats and chairperson offices. Article 243U fixes the five-year duration and the election discipline on dissolution. Article 243V disqualifies, with the age proviso. Article 243W states the permissive devolution of functions and introduces the Twelfth Schedule. Articles 243X, 243Y and 243Z deal in turn with taxation, the State Finance Commission’s review of municipal finances, and audit. Article 243ZA vests elections in the State Election Commission, Article 243ZB extends the Part to the Union territories, and Article 243ZC excludes the Scheduled Areas and protects the Darjeeling council. Articles 243ZD and 243ZE create the District Planning Committee and the Metropolitan Planning Committee. Article 243ZF continued the old laws for a year, and Article 243ZG closes the Part by barring court interference in electoral matters except through an election petition. The sequence runs from definition to constitution to composition to term to power to money to elections to planning, and its centre of gravity is unmistakable: five articles on what a municipality is and how it is chosen, one permissive article on what it may be allowed to do.

The three types of municipality the 74th Amendment created

Article 243Q directs that there shall be constituted, in every State, a Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, that is, an area in transition from a rural area to an urban area; a Municipal Council for a smaller urban area; and a Municipal Corporation for a larger urban area. The constitution of each body is by the Governor, by public notification, and the Governor acts having regard to the population of the area, the density of the population in it, the revenue generated for local administration, the percentage of employment in non-agricultural activities, the economic importance of the area, and such other factors as the Governor may deem fit. The three names are therefore not three species of institution with three fixed constitutions. They are three points on a single scale of urbanisation, and the notification that places an area at one point rather than another is an act of classification by the State, performed against the factors the article lists.

Two features of this scheme repay attention. The first is what the Constitution does not say. It fixes no population figure for any of the three types. It does not say that a corporation requires a million residents or that a council serves a town of a particular size. The numbers that govern classification in practice, and they differ considerably, come from the State municipal Acts, which prescribe the population bands and conditions for each class of body within the State. A reader who is offered a single all-India population threshold for a municipal corporation is being offered something the constitutional text does not contain. The second feature is the direction of travel the scheme assumes. A transitional area is by definition an area becoming urban, and the Nagar Panchayat is the institutional form of that becoming: it governs a place whose economy and settlement pattern have outgrown the panchayat but whose revenue and density do not yet sustain a council. As the factors change, the State may reclassify, and the same settlement can pass through all three forms over its life, each reclassification carrying consequences for taxation, staffing and the scale of functions the body is expected to carry.

The threefold scheme was also an act of rationalisation, because the urban India the amendment inherited was governed through a menagerie. Alongside the municipal corporations of the great cities and the municipal councils and boards of the ordinary towns stood town area committees for places too small or too poor for a council, notified area committees appointed rather than elected for areas of special importance, and cantonment boards under a central statute for the military stations. The categories overlapped, the franchises differed, and the degree of election ran from full to none. The amendment swept the statutory menagerie into three elected types and left two survivals at its edges: the cantonment board, which governs the civil population of a cantonment under the Cantonments Act and answers to the Union rather than to Part IXA, and the industrial township of the proviso, which needs no municipality at all. The rationalisation is easy to miss because it is negative, a set of bodies that ceased to be the standard forms, but for the resident of a former notified area the amendment’s first gift was not a function or a fund. It was an election where an appointment had been.

Article 243Q carries one exception, and it is a considered one. The Governor may specify an area to be an industrial township, where municipal services are provided or proposed to be provided by an industrial establishment in that area, and for such an area no municipality need be constituted. The reasoning is functional: where a single industrial establishment already supplies the water, roads, sanitation and housing of a company town, an elected municipality would duplicate an administration that exists. The cost is equally plain, and it is considered below in the questions at the end of this article: the residents of such a township receive municipal services without municipal democracy, and the exception shows that the amendment’s commitment to elected urban government yields where an alternative provider is thought to make election unnecessary.

Classification has a shadow, and it falls on the census town. The Census of India distinguishes statutory towns, which have a municipality or an equivalent statutory body, from census towns, which satisfy the census tests of urban character, a population of at least five thousand, a density of at least four hundred persons per square kilometre and at least three quarters of the male main workforce in non-agricultural pursuits, but which remain governed by panchayats because the State has not notified them as urban areas. The Census of 2011 counted 7,935 towns, of which 3,894 were census towns, settlements urban in fact and rural in government, housing crores of residents who receive neither the municipal services their economy presupposes nor, under Part IXA, the municipal franchise. The gap is a creature of the notification power: urbanisation as a demographic fact does not trigger Article 243Q, which waits on the Governor’s specification of a municipal area, and States have fiscal and political reasons to delay the trigger, because municipal status brings municipal taxation, municipal reservation and municipal elections in its train. The transitional area, designed as the bridge across this gap, is crossed only when the State decides to build it.

Later constitutional practice has overlaid the threefold classification with a fiscal classification of its own. The Fifteenth Finance Commission divided its urban grants between the million-plus cities, which it treated as a distinct class with performance-linked support, and the remaining urban local bodies, which it supported on a different formula. The overlay matters because it shows classification doing new work: the 1992 text classifies by stage of urbanisation, transitional, smaller, larger, while the fiscal system classifies by scale, because the problems of a city of five million, air, water stress, metropolitan transport, are not the problems of a council town written larger. A Nagar Panchayat and a million-plus corporation are the same species at different magnitudes under the amendment; under the grant system they are different categories of claimant. Both classifications are lawful, and the tension between them is a fair summary of the amendment’s position in a Republic that has grown more urban than its 1992 categories anticipated.

Below the three types sits the territorial unit from which all of them are built. Article 243R requires that all the seats in a municipality shall be filled by persons chosen by direct election from the territorial constituencies in the municipal area, and for this purpose the municipal area is divided into territorial constituencies known as wards. The ward is the atom of the system: the unit a councillor represents, the unit by reference to which reservation is rotated, and the unit whose boundaries, drawn under State law, decide the shape of every municipal election.

The incentives around notification run in both directions, which is why the map of statutory urban India changes so slowly. A settlement that becomes a statutory town gains a municipality, municipal taxation and access to urban programmes, and loses its panchayat and with it the rural development architecture, including employment and housing schemes framed for rural areas, that its residents may draw on. Residents of a census town may therefore be found on both sides of the question, traders and salaried households pressing for municipal services and status, poorer households calculating that the rural entitlements they hold are worth more than the municipal services they are promised. The State’s calculation has its own symmetry: notification creates an elected body the State does not control, with reserved seats it cannot allocate and elections it cannot schedule, while the census town remains administratively convenient and fiscally undemanding. The transitional area of Article 243Q was designed for exactly this population, a halfway house in which a settlement could acquire urban government before it acquired the full urban burden, and the reluctance of States to use the bridge at scale is the reluctance this article has met at every level of the design, the preference for the administered settlement over the self-governing one whenever the Constitution leaves the choice open.

Who sits in the council: composition, reservation and disqualification

The elected councillors are the centre of the composition, but Article 243R permits the State legislature to add three further elements, and most State Acts use at least one of them. The legislature may provide for the representation of persons having special knowledge or experience in municipal administration, with the express condition that such persons shall not have the right to vote in the meetings of the municipality: expertise is admitted to the chamber and denied a vote in it. It may provide for the representation of the members of the House of the People and of the State Legislative Assembly representing constituencies that comprise wholly or partly the municipal area. It may likewise provide for members of the Council of States and of the State Legislative Council who are registered as electors within the municipal area, and for the chairpersons of the wards committees. The council that results is therefore a mixed body: a directly elected core, surrounded by a ring of legislators whose constituencies overlap the city and a small number of nominated specialists who may speak and not vote. The manner of election of the chairperson of a municipality is left entirely to the State legislature, a silence whose consequences run through the whole of this article, because the chairperson of a corporation is its mayor and the Constitution neither elects the mayor nor says how anyone else shall.

Reservation is part of the mandatory core. Article 243T requires seats to be reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in every municipality, in the proportion that their population in the municipal area bears to its total population, with the reserved seats allotted by rotation to different constituencies. Not less than one third of the seats so reserved must be reserved for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes. Not less than one third of the total number of seats to be filled by direct election, including the seats reserved for women of those classes, must be reserved for women, again by rotation. The offices of chairpersons are reserved for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women in the manner the State legislature provides. The reservation for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is tied to the period in Article 334 and ends when that period ends. Finally, and permissively, nothing in the Part prevents a State legislature from reserving seats or chairperson offices for any backward class of citizens, a clause whose judicial construction is taken up below.

The design choices inside Article 243T deserve notice because they are choices. Reservation follows population for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes but is fixed at a floor of one third for women irrespective of population share. Allotment is by rotation, so a reserved seat moves between wards from election to election, which distributes the benefit across the city and simultaneously prevents a reserved-seat councillor from building an incumbency in one ward. And the reservation of chairperson offices is separated from the reservation of seats and handed to State law, so the visibility of reservation at the head of the institution varies by State in a way the reservation of seats does not.

Disqualification is dealt with in Article 243V. A person is disqualified for being chosen as, and for being, a member of a municipality if disqualified under any law in force for the purposes of elections to the State legislature, or under any law made by the State legislature, and questions of disqualification are referred to the authority and decided in the manner the State law provides. One proviso is small, exact and much examined: no person shall be disqualified on the ground that the person is less than twenty-five years of age, if the person has attained the age of twenty-one years. The Constitution thereby fixes twenty-one as the effective floor for municipal candidature, below the twenty-five that the corresponding legislative provision might otherwise import, and State laws have added further disqualifications of their own on matters such as encroachment on municipal land and arrears of municipal dues, whose validity is tested against the Part rather than assumed from it.

Between the council chamber and the citizen stands the council’s own internal machinery, which Part IXA does not design and the State Acts do. The classic corporation Acts divide the municipal government into distinct authorities: in the pattern associated with Bombay and followed in several States, the corporation itself, a standing committee drawn from the councillors, and the Municipal Commissioner are separately constituted organs, each with statutory functions, the standing committee carrying much of the financial and contractual business that would otherwise wait for the full council. Subject committees of councillors scrutinise departments in the larger corporations. None of this is in the Constitution, and its presence or absence decides how much of the corporation’s business the elected element transacts between meetings of the full body. A council that meets to ratify decisions prepared elsewhere, by the administration and by committees it does not control, experiences the amendment’s neutrality from the inside.

The council’s formal levers, for completeness, are real even where they are weak. Under the State Acts the council approves the municipal budget, and no tax within the authorised field is levied and no money is spent outside the budget the council passes; the council makes bye-laws for the regulation of the matters in its charge, subject in most Acts to the State government’s sanction; it elects its committees and its presiding officers; and its members question the administration in the chamber, call for papers the Act entitles them to see, and record dissents that follow a file. A determined council can refuse a budget, block a bye-law and make a Commissioner’s tenure politically expensive. What it cannot do is the thing a legislature does to a government: it cannot remove the executive, because the executive is not its creature. The levers operate on the administration’s proposals, never on the administration’s tenure, and the distinction between influencing a government and being one is the whole distance between the corporation of the State Acts and the institution of self-government of Article 243W.

The councillor’s working life is spent at the ward’s scale, and it explains the office’s peculiar politics. The councillor is the resident’s first address for the services the municipality and its rivals supply: the water connection, the drain, the street light, the birth certificate, the grievance about the refuse contract. Several corporations allot each councillor a ward-level development fund for small local works, on the pattern of the legislator’s local area development scheme, and the fund, modest beside the corporation’s budget, is for many wards the most visible money in municipal politics because it is the only money whose spending a named elected person chooses. The casework role is not a corruption of the office; it is the office as the design leaves it. A councillor who cannot command the administration can still intercede with it, and intercession, repeated across thousands of wards, is the form that representation takes when the representative body does not govern. Political scientists who study the Indian city describe its elected politics as a politics of brokerage for this reason, and the description begins in the constitutional fact that the broker’s principals, the Commissioner and the State government, are appointed by someone else.

Rotation, the mechanism by which reserved seats and offices move between wards, carries its own debate. Its defenders point to the spread of opportunity: reservation that stayed in one ward would create a permanent reserved constituency and a political class confined to it, while rotation distributes the experience of office across the city’s wards and across the communities within them. Its critics answer that rotation severs the link between a reserved-seat councillor and re-election, since the ward that returns the councillor will not be reserved, or will not return the same person, at the next election, and that a representative who cannot be re-elected from the same seat answers to the party that will nominate the person elsewhere more than to the ward that elected the person here. The related criticism, pressed hardest in the panchayat context and heard in municipalities as well, is that reserved offices, and in particular the offices reserved for women, are sometimes exercised through husbands and male relatives, the phenomenon the debate names with the suffix of proxy office-holding; the answer given by the defenders of reservation is that the phenomenon is a transitional cost of first-generation representation, that it recedes as incumbents acquire experience and independent standing, and that the alternative on offer was not direct representation but none. Several States have in any event used their legislative power to raise the share of seats reserved for women in municipalities from the constitutional floor of one third to one half, treating the floor in Article 243T as the beginning of the argument rather than its end.

Backward class reservation in municipalities is the point at which the permissive clause met the courts. In K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India (2010), a Constitution Bench upheld the constitutional validity of reservation for backward classes in local bodies under Article 243T(6) and its rural counterpart, while holding that the reservation must rest on empirical inquiry into backwardness in relation to local bodies and must observe the ceiling on total reservation that the Court’s jurisprudence prescribes. In Vikas Kishanrao Gawali v. State of Maharashtra (2021), the Court organised the requirement into the triple test: a dedicated commission must conduct a rigorous empirical inquiry into backwardness in the local bodies concerned, the proportion of reservation must be specified on the basis of that inquiry, and the total reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the backward classes together must not ordinarily exceed fifty per cent. A State that wishes to reserve municipal seats for backward classes must therefore do work of a specified kind first, and the consequences of not doing it run directly into the election cases on the five-year term examined in the section that follows.

The five-year term and the discipline of elections

Article 243U gives every municipality a duration of five years from the date appointed for its first meeting, and no longer. An amendment of the law cannot be used to dissolve a municipality that is functioning when the amendment is made, before its five years have run. An election to constitute a municipality must be completed before the expiry of its duration, and where a municipality has been dissolved, before the expiration of a period of six months from the date of its dissolution, with a proviso that no election is required where the remainder of the dissolved body’s term is less than six months. A municipality constituted on a dissolution does not begin a fresh five years: it continues only for the remainder of the period for which the dissolved municipality would have continued. Article 243ZA vests the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls for, and the conduct of, all elections to the municipalities in the State Election Commission referred to in Article 243K, and Article 243ZG bars the courts from questioning the validity of delimitation laws and confines challenges to an election to an election petition under State law.

The starting point of the term carries a small mechanical lesson. The five years run from the date appointed for the first meeting, so the clock is set not by the declaration of results but by the convening of the body, and a State that delayed the first meeting would be spending the term without shortening the interval before the next election falls due, because the election duty in Article 243U is keyed to the expiry of the duration so computed. The device closes, in advance, the most obvious evasion the text’s own definition invites, and it illustrates the care with which the election provisions were drafted by comparison with the permissive provisions elsewhere in the Part: the framers had watched terms manipulated and drafted against the manipulation.

Dissolution itself, called supersession in the older statutes, remains possible under State law on grounds the State Acts specify, and the State government that dissolves a council appoints an administrator to run the municipality in the interval. What the amendment changed is the price and the duration of that step. Before 1993, supersession could function as an indefinite suspension of urban democracy, because the obligation to hold the next election had no constitutional clock behind it. After 1993, the clock is in the Constitution: election within six months, and the successor body inherits only the remainder of the term, so a State that dissolves a hostile council gains an administrator for months, not a reset of the electoral calendar for years. The grounds and the hearing that precede dissolution are matters of State law and of the general law of fairness; the temporal discipline is constitutional.

The courts have treated the election provisions as commands rather than aspirations. In Kishansing Tomar v. Municipal Corporation of the City of Ahmedabad (2006) 8 SCC 352, a Constitution Bench considered delays in completing municipal elections in Gujarat, where delimitation of wards and revision of electoral rolls had been allowed to push the election beyond the term of the outgoing corporation. The Court held that the election must be completed before the expiration of the five-year duration fixed by Article 243U, that the State Election Commission must not put forward excuses of that administrative kind, that any revision of electoral rolls must be carried out in time and the election held on the rolls in force if revision cannot be finished, and that the State Election Commission, in the domain of elections to panchayats and municipalities, enjoys the same status and the same amplitude of power under Articles 243K and 243ZA as the Election Commission of India enjoys under Article 324. The reasoning matters as much as the result: the five-year term in Part IXA is not a target towards which the machinery should drift but a boundary the machinery must organise itself to meet.

The institution charged with this discipline is itself a study in the amendment’s divided method. The State Election Commissioner is appointed by the Governor, and Article 243K protects the office in the manner of a constitutional appointment: the Commissioner shall not be removed from office except in like manner and on the like grounds as a judge of a High Court, and the conditions of service shall not be varied to the Commissioner’s disadvantage after appointment. Status, tenure and salary are therefore constitutionally sheltered. Staff, machinery and money are not: the Commission conducts elections through the district administration it borrows from the State government, and its budget travels through the ordinary channels of State finance. The Kishansing Tomar holding that the Commission enjoys, in its domain, the same status as the Election Commission of India is a holding about power, and it is real; the friction that fills the municipal election case law arises because the softer instruments of delay, the timing of delimitation, the rotation of reserved seats, the preparation of rolls, sit in several States in the hands of the State government rather than the Commission, so that an election can be postponed without any single actor ever refusing to hold it.

That allocation of the preparatory functions is the recurring trigger of the litigation. Delimitation of wards changes who votes where and which seats stand reserved, and a government that controls its timing controls the electoral calendar without touching the term, because a State Election Commission cannot conduct an election to wards that have not been drawn. The disputes that reached the Supreme Court from Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh in the years after 2020 were, beneath their reservation questions, disputes about this allocation: State legislatures had amended the municipal Acts to draw the delimitation power towards the State government, elections fell due while the preparatory work stood unfinished, and the Court had to decide whether the unfinished work excused the delay. Its answer, in the Madhya Pradesh case taken up next, was that it did not.

Sixteen years later the same discipline had to be applied to a newer device. In Suresh Mahajan v. State of Madhya Pradesh, decided in May 2022, elections to a very large number of local bodies in the State had not been held, and the explanation offered was that the triple test for backward class reservation had not been completed, so the State Election Commission could not notify reserved seats. The Supreme Court restated the Constitution Bench position in Kishansing Tomar, described the mandate of Articles 243E and 243U as inviolable, and directed the State Election Commission to issue the election programme without further delay on the basis of the wards as delimited when the elections had fallen due. Until the triple test formality was completed in all respects, no reservation for the backward classes could be provisioned, and the seats other than those reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, which are a constitutional requirement, were to be notified for the general category. The order is the clearest modern statement of the hierarchy inside Part IXA: the permissive power to reserve for backward classes, exercised through an unfinished administrative process, cannot be converted into a reason to suspend the mandatory duty to hold the election itself. Reservation policy waits; the term does not.

The bar in Article 243ZG completes the electoral scheme and is worth a paragraph because it allocates a power residents often assume the courts hold. The validity of a law relating to the delimitation of wards or the allotment of seats, made or purporting to be made under the Part, shall not be called in question in any court, and no election to a municipality shall be called in question except by an election petition presented to the authority and in the manner the State legislature provides. The provision is the municipal counterpart of the bars that protect parliamentary, assembly and panchayat elections from mid-process judicial interruption, and its logic is the logic of the term itself: an election that any dissatisfied litigant could freeze by writ would be an election the State could always postpone, and the framers of Part IXA, who had the supersession decades in front of them, closed the judicial route to delay as firmly as the administrative one. What the bar does not protect is the election’s result, which the petition route exposes to scrutiny after the event, nor the preparatory legislation itself, whose validity the courts examined in the delimitation disputes described above. The line the Part draws is between challenging the framework beforehand, which is permitted, interrupting the process midway, which is not, and contesting the outcome afterwards, which is the petition’s business.

The conduct of the election itself assembles every theme of this article in one process. The State Election Commission issues the programme and superintends the poll, working through returning officers drawn from the district administration. The wards across which the poll is held were delimited under the State Act, by the State government or by the authority the Act names, and the seats standing reserved, and the wards to which reservation has rotated for this election, were determined under the same State framework the Commission must then apply. The electoral roll for the municipal area is, in the pattern most State laws follow, built upon the roll for the Assembly constituencies covering the area, adapted to the wards, so the municipal franchise rides on the legislative roll rather than on a register of its own. Polling stations, staff and security come from the State’s general administrative stock. The Commission’s constitutional authority over this machinery is plenary in the sense the courts have given it, and its practical dependence on the machinery’s owners is total in the sense the machinery’s owners understand. A municipal election is thus the State governing itself at one remove: the term is the Constitution’s, the calendar is the Commission’s, the map is the government’s, and the voter, whose act begins the whole sequence, encounters at the booth an institution assembled from every layer of the design this article has described.

Supersession: the old weapon inside the new frame

Because dissolution is the point at which the old regime and the new text meet, its history is worth stating concretely. Under the pre-amendment statutes, supersession required no one’s permission and answered to no clock, and States used it at a scale that is difficult to credit from inside the present system. The corporation of Chennai was superseded in 1973, and the city, one of the four great municipal corporations of the country, was governed by administrators and special officers until elections were held in 1996, a gap of more than two decades in which a generation of residents reached voting age, paid municipal taxes and received municipal services without ever electing the body that supplied them. Chennai was the extreme case of a general practice, not an aberration: across the States, councils spent long cumulative periods under administrators, and the administrator, an officer of the State government, was for many urban residents the normal form of municipal government, the elected council being the interruption.

The post-amendment law of dissolution is best understood as a set of locks fitted to that history. The State retains the power: a council may still be dissolved under the State Act, on grounds such as persistent default, incompetence or abuse of powers, through the procedure the Act prescribes. What the State cannot retain is the interval. The election must follow within six months unless the remainder of the term is shorter, the administrator’s regime is bounded by that election, and the body elected after dissolution serves the remainder only, so the electoral calendar of the city cannot be restarted by the act of dissolution itself. The locks do not prevent a determined State government from dissolving a hostile council, and dissolutions continue to occur and to be litigated on their grounds. They prevent the dissolution from becoming a government. The distinction is the amendment in miniature: it rarely forbids the State an outcome, and it systematically removes the State’s ability to make the outcome permanent.

Wards Committees: the tier below the council

Article 243S is mandatory in form and thin in content, and the gap between the two is instructive. It provides that there shall be constituted Wards Committees, consisting of one or more wards, within the territorial area of a municipality having a population of three lakh or more. Below that figure, the provision does not bite, and the smaller council or Nagar Panchayat has no constitutional sub-structure. Above it, the committee is not optional: the words are “shall be constituted”. What the committee is, beyond its wards, the article leaves to the State legislature, which may by law make provision with respect to its composition, its territorial area and the manner in which its seats shall be filled. The member of the municipality representing a ward within the committee’s area is a member of the committee, and the article prescribes the chairmanship in outline: where the committee consists of one ward, the member representing that ward chairs it; where it consists of two or more wards, one of the members representing those wards, chosen by the route the text and State law prescribe.

The threshold itself is measured on the definition in Article 243P: population means the population as ascertained at the last preceding census of which the relevant figures have been published. A municipality whose residents have multiplied past three lakh between censuses does not cross the constitutional line until the census figures say so, and the obligation to constitute Wards Committees awakens on publication rather than on the fact. The lag is a small instance of a general feature of the Part, which prefers the certainty of published figures to the accuracy of current estimates, accepting that the map of obligations will trail the map of settlement by the length of a census cycle. For a provision whose breach is in any case difficult to remedy, the lag has mattered less than the reluctance described below; but it completes the account of how even the mandatory provisions of Part IXA are mediated, first by a definition, then by a State law, then by the administrative will to use either.

What can a Ward Committee actually do once it exists?

Whatever the State statute assigns to it, and in most States that is consultation rather than decision. A Ward Committee typically advises on local works, sanitation and grievances for its wards and gives residents a forum below the council; it has no independent budget, no staff of its own and no power to bind the municipality.

The pattern repeats the amendment’s master pattern at a smaller scale. Existence is commanded; power is donated. A State that constitutes Wards Committees and assigns them scrutiny of local works, supervision of sanitation contracts and a grievance forum has built a genuine third-and-a-half tier of urban government. A State that constitutes them and assigns them nothing has complied with Article 243S and defeated it in the same act. An extensive review of the creation and functioning of Wards Committees in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, carried out by the Institute of Social Sciences, recorded the patent reluctance of State governments to accept Wards Committees as an important forum of public participation at the local level, with Kerala and West Bengal as the only exceptions among the States studied. The reluctance is intelligible in the amendment’s own terms: a Wards Committee with real functions is a centre of authority below the council, and the same State governments that resist surrendering power to the council resist its further descent to the ward.

Composition at the ward level repeats the national argument in miniature. The Constitution reserves the committee’s design to State law, and the States have answered differently on the question that matters most to residents: whether a resident who holds no office may sit on the body at all. Karnataka’s design for Bengaluru joins the ward’s councillor with members nominated from among residents and associations of the ward, admitting the governed to the committee as members rather than as petitioners. Kerala carried the principle further by building ward sabhas, assemblies of the ward’s voters, into its municipal law beneath the committee structure. Other States confine their committees to elected members and officials, making the ward committee a sub-committee of the council in the plain sense. The three answers correspond to three theories of what the committee is for: a channel through which residents instruct, a forum in which residents are heard, or an organ through which the council organises its own work. Article 243S is satisfied by all three, which is another way of saying that the article settles the committee’s existence and nothing about its nature.

Two later developments tested the same reluctance from opposite directions. The Union government’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, in the period of its operation, made State enactment of a community participation law a reform condition of its funding, pressing States to create area sabhas, assemblies of the voters of a polling area, below the ward committee, so that participation would have a statutory rung beneath the councillor. The design was drawn from the model community participation legislation circulated with the mission, and the States that enacted such laws placed the area sabha, in the main, where they had placed the ward committee: in the statute book, with functions of consultation and recommendation. From the other direction, residents themselves have litigated the provision into partial life: in Bengaluru, residents’ associations pressed the corporation through proceedings in the Karnataka High Court to constitute wards committees in accordance with the State Act and to make them meet and transact business, a species of litigation that has no equivalent for most provisions of Part IXA, because the ward committee is the one institution in the Part whose absence a resident can feel on a named street. The committee’s history thus condenses the amendment’s: commanded in terms, donated in substance, and activated, where it is activated at all, by pressure from below rather than by design from above.

The executive the 74th Amendment did not touch

Nothing in Part IXA creates, names or empowers a municipal executive. The Part does not mention a Municipal Commissioner. It does not define the powers of a mayor, prescribe a mayor’s term, or say whether the mayor is to be elected by the voters of the city or by the councillors from among themselves. The entire executive architecture of Indian city government lives in the State municipal Acts, which were written, most of them, before the amendment and were concerned with a different problem: how a State government administers a city through officers answerable to itself, with an elected council advising, consenting and protesting at the margin.

Under the typical State municipal corporation Act, executive authority vests in a Municipal Commissioner appointed by the State government, drawn in the large corporations from the Indian Administrative Service or the State civil services. The Commissioner is the corporation’s chief executive and its administrative head: the municipal staff are appointed, posted and disciplined within the establishment the Commissioner directs; contracts are executed under the Commissioner’s authority; the budget is prepared by the administration the Commissioner leads and placed before the council; and the Commissioner’s tenure, transfer and removal are matters between the officer and the State government, in which the council and the mayor have no constitutional and usually no statutory say. The mayor, by contrast, presides. The mayor chairs the meetings of the corporation, is its ceremonial and civic head, represents the city on public occasions, and in most States is elected by the councillors rather than by the city’s voters, for a term the State Act fixes. In several States that term is shorter than the council’s five years: in Maharashtra the mayor holds office for two and a half years within the council’s term, and in Bengaluru the mayor is elected for a term of one year. The elected head of the city therefore changes, in much of urban India, more often than the council that elects the mayor and far more often than the administrative leadership that actually directs the city’s services.

The exceptions prove that the pattern is a choice and not a necessity. Madhya Pradesh provides for mayors elected directly by the voters of the city, so the mayor of an Indore or a Bhopal carries a personal mandate from the whole city rather than a borrowed one from the council chamber. West Bengal’s Kolkata Municipal Corporation works through a mayor-in-council, in which the mayor heads an executive committee of councillors and exercises executive authority under the State Act, a structure closer to a cabinet than to a presidency. These models exist inside the same Part IXA as the weakest mayoralty in the country, and nothing in the constitutional text prefers one to another. The amendment is neutral between the ceremonial mayor and the executive mayor, between the direct mandate and the indirect one, and that neutrality is itself the finding: on the question of who governs the city between elections, the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act has no position, because the question was left where it had always been, with the State legislature.

The asymmetry can be put as a single comparison, and it is the comparison residents find hardest to believe. Under the typical State Act, the councillors may remove the mayor: the presiding officer they elected holds office during their pleasure in the patterns several Acts prescribe, exposed to no-confidence motions and to the shifts of council arithmetic. The same councillors may not remove, censure with effect, or even transfer the Commissioner, whose accountability runs to the government that appointed the officer and whose appraisal is written within the services. The elected head is removable by the elected body and powerless over the administration; the appointed head is removable by the government alone and powerful over everything else. Reform proposals for a strong mayor are, at bottom, proposals to collapse this asymmetry in one direction, by giving the removable officer the administration as well, and the resistance to them is a resistance to collapsing it in the other, by making the powerful officer answerable to the chamber. Madhya Pradesh’s directly elected mayors hold their mandates from the city’s voters for the council’s full term, which removes the no-confidence asymmetry without touching the Commissioner’s separate accountability, an intermediate position that shows how many distinct questions the single word mayor conceals: who elects, for how long, removable by whom, and commanding what.

Around this executive the State Acts build a frame of State control that completes the picture. The State government appoints the Commissioner, and under the classic corporation Acts the Commissioner’s salary is a charge on the municipal fund, so the city pays for an executive it does not choose. The State government reserves powers of supervision in the Acts themselves: to call for records and returns, to cause inspections, to suspend the execution of a resolution or order of the corporation on stated grounds of public interest or excess of authority, and, at the end of the scale, to dissolve the body under the discipline Article 243U imposes. A mayor may likewise be removed under the State Act by processes the Act prescribes, in which the State government’s hand is usually present. The council therefore governs inside a double frame: its executive is appointed over its head, and its collective decisions are liable to suspension from above. Defenders of the frame describe it as the necessary safeguard of a senior government over bodies that borrow, contract and tax; its critics describe it as the legal form of the proposition that the city is a department with elections attached. The amendment, which might have redistributed these powers, left every one of them where the State Acts had put them.

Below the corporations, the same architecture repeats at smaller scale and with thinner resources. A Municipal Council is presided over by a president or chairperson elected under the State Act and is served by an executive officer or chief officer appointed through the State’s municipal service or by the State government, who holds the administrative charge of the town. A Nagar Panchayat works through a still smaller establishment. The officers who staff these bodies belong, in most States, to a State municipal service or to the general State services on deputation, and their postings and promotions run through the State’s municipal administration department rather than through the bodies they serve. The consequence is a gradient the amendment did nothing to flatten: the larger the city, the more senior and capable the appointed executive it attracts, and the smaller the town, the more completely its government consists of a council of part-time representatives facing an administration of one or two officers borrowed from elsewhere. When the literature speaks of municipal capacity, it is this gradient, and not the corporation cities that dominate the debate, that it usually means.

The case for the appointed executive deserves to be stated at its full strength, because it is the case that has prevailed in most States for over a century and it is not a foolish case. Municipal administration is technical: water treatment, sewerage networks, solid waste processing, public health engineering and municipal finance are disciplines in which error is expensive and occasionally lethal, and a small elected council, chosen ward by ward on local grievances, may not command that expertise from within its own ranks. The State and all-India services supply trained administrators, continuity across changes of political control, and a career discipline that answers to professional standards as well as to instructions. Supporters of the model add that the largest municipal corporations handle budgets exceeding those of the smallest States, and that entrusting sums of that order to an executive without administrative training, removable at the pleasure of a shifting council majority, invites instability of a kind the services were designed to prevent. The High Powered Expert Committee on urban infrastructure and services, chaired by Isher Judge Ahluwalia, documented in 2011 how thin the administrative and technical capacity inside urban local bodies actually is, and capacity arguments of that weight cannot be answered by pointing at a ballot box.

The case for an elected executive answers on a different axis altogether. Accountability for services, it runs, cannot be separated from accountability at elections: a resident whose water fails can vote against a councillor and a mayor, but the failure belongs to an administration neither of them commands, so the election punishes the powerless and instructs nobody. A mayor who cannot appoint, transfer or direct the officers responsible for delivery is a mayor in the sense that a figurehead is a captain. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, in its Sixth Report on local governance in 2007, recommended strengthening the office of mayor and placing real executive authority in elected hands, treating the separation of the elected head from the executive as a defect to be repaired rather than a safeguard to be preserved. The mayor-in-council and directly elected mayor models that some States operate are then deployed as the practical proof: cities in India are governed through elected executives where State law permits it, and the sky has not fallen in Kolkata or Indore.

Both cases are honestly held, and the amendment’s neutrality means the argument is conducted State by State, statute by statute, with no constitutional court of appeal. What can be said from the text is narrower and decisive for understanding everything else in this article. The amendment’s authors constitutionalised the parts of municipal government they were determined to protect, elections, reservation and term, and left the executive unprotected and unprescribed. Whether that was prudence, compromise or exhaustion, the consequence is structural and permanent until a State chooses otherwise: the person the voter can remove does not run the city, and the person who runs the city cannot be removed by the voter.

The Twelfth Schedule and the permissive verb: Article 243W

Article 243W is the devolution provision, and its grammar is the whole story. The legislature of a State may, by law, endow the municipalities with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as institutions of self-government, and such law may contain provisions for the devolution of powers and responsibilities upon municipalities with respect to two things: the preparation of plans for economic development and social justice, and the performance of functions and the implementation of schemes as may be entrusted to them, including those in relation to the matters listed in the Twelfth Schedule. Every element of the sentence is permissive. The State may endow; the content of the endowment is what the State law says it is; and the Twelfth Schedule is not a transfer but a menu, a list of matters in relation to which functions may be entrusted. A page that states that the Twelfth Schedule functions stand transferred to municipalities by the Constitution has misread the operative provision, and the error is the most common one in the literature on this amendment.

The eighteen matters in the Schedule, stated in the order the Schedule gives them, are these. Urban planning including town planning. Regulation of land use and construction of buildings. Planning for economic and social development. Roads and bridges. Water supply for domestic, industrial and commercial purposes. Public health, sanitation conservancy and solid waste management. Fire services. Urban forestry, protection of the environment and promotion of ecological aspects. Safeguarding the interests of weaker sections of society, including, in the Schedule’s words, the handicapped and mentally retarded. Slum improvement and upgradation. Urban poverty alleviation. Provision of urban amenities and facilities such as parks, gardens and playgrounds. Promotion of cultural, educational and aesthetic aspects. Burials and burial grounds, cremations, cremation grounds and electric crematoriums. Cattle pounds and prevention of cruelty to animals. Vital statistics including registration of births and deaths. Public amenities including street lighting, parking lots, bus stops and public conveniences. Regulation of slaughter houses and tanneries.

The eighteen items fall into families, and the families have had different fortunes under devolution. The first family is the land family: urban planning, land use regulation and the planning of economic and social development, the functions that decide what the city becomes. The second is the network family: roads and bridges, water supply, sanitation and solid waste, fire services, the physical systems on which urban life runs. The third is the welfare family: protection of weaker sections, slum improvement, poverty alleviation, the functions that decide who the city is for. The fourth is the amenity family: parks and playgrounds, cultural promotion, burials and cremations, cattle pounds, vital statistics, street lighting and the regulation of slaughter houses and tanneries, the functions that decide what the city feels like to live in. The devolution record, stated at the level of the pattern rather than of any single State, is that the amenity family passed to municipalities most completely, the network family in part, with water and metropolitan transport frequently withheld in the largest cities, the welfare family substantially as agency work under State and Union schemes, and the land family least of all, because planning and development control are the functions through which a State government shapes the most valuable asset in its territory. The Schedule’s order is not a ranking, but the order in which States surrendered the items approximates an ascending scale of value, surrendered last where the stakes were highest.

Read as a portrait of a city, the list is strikingly complete: it covers the land the city stands on, the water it drinks, the waste it produces, the roads it moves on, the poor it shelters and the dead it buries. Read as law, every item waits on a State statute. Two of the items show the waiting in its sharpest form, because each has generated a body of State legislation and litigation of its own. The sixth item places solid waste within public health and sanitation, and the municipal obligation to collect, transport and process the city’s refuse, which State rules and national rules have since elaborated at length, is traced in the series article on urban sanitation and waste law in India. The tenth item, slum improvement and upgradation, names the function that decides whether the poorest residents of the city are treated as citizens to be housed or encroachments to be cleared, and the statutes and judgments through which States have answered that question are the subject of the series article on slum rehabilitation law in India.

The older municipal Acts organised functions on a distinction the Twelfth Schedule does not use, and the distinction survives inside the new frame. The classic Acts divided municipal duties into obligatory functions, which the body was bound to perform and for whose neglect remedies lay, and discretionary functions, which it might undertake as its finances allowed. Water supply, sewerage, public streets and the removal of refuse stood in the obligatory column; libraries, museums and rest houses in the discretionary one. The Twelfth Schedule lists its eighteen matters without that division, because the Schedule is not a code of duties but the subject matter of a possible devolution, and the obligatory character of any function in a given city still comes from the State Act that governs it. The practical consequence is that a resident’s legal claim to a service runs through the State Act’s classification, not through the Schedule’s list, and two cities in two States can stand in different legal relations to the identical Schedule entry.

A second pattern overlays the first. A large share of what a municipality does in practice arrives not as devolved authority but as agency work: the municipality implements schemes designed, funded and monitored by the State or the Union, from housing and sanitation missions to urban livelihood programmes, applying guidelines it did not write to targets it did not set. Implementation is real work and it fills the municipal day, but it is the opposite pole from self-government, because the discretion that defines government, the choice of ends, sits with the scheme’s author. The amendment’s phrase, institutions of self-government, is the standard against which this agency reality is measured in the assessments of the devolution record, and the distance between the phrase and the practice is the distance Article 243W’s permissive drafting left open.

The first limb of Article 243W, the preparation of plans for economic development and social justice, is the quietest provision in the Part and repays a moment’s attention, because it assigns to the municipality a function of a different kind from service delivery: the function of deciding, for its own area, what development is for. A municipality exercising the limb would survey its area, set its priorities between water and roads and housing, and present its plan upward into the district consolidation as the city’s own statement of its needs. The limb presupposes a planning capacity inside the municipality, engineers, economists and data, that the executive arrangements described above do not supply, and in most cities the plan the municipality presents is the budget under another name. Kerala’s decentralised planning is again the exception that identifies the rule, because there the municipalities and panchayats were given plan funds worth planning for and a campaign structure that taught the preparation of local plans ward by ward. The lesson generalises beyond Kerala: the planning limb of Article 243W is exercised where money follows it, and lies dormant where the municipality’s plan would commit nothing, which is the fiscal truth underneath every other provision of the Part.

Money follows the same permissive pattern. Article 243X provides that the State legislature may by law authorise a municipality to levy, collect and appropriate specified taxes, duties, tolls and fees; may assign to the municipalities the proceeds of State taxes; may provide for grants-in-aid from the Consolidated Fund of the State; and may provide for the constitution of municipal funds. Article 243Y extends the remit of the State Finance Commission constituted under Article 243I to the municipalities, requiring it to review their financial position and recommend the distribution between the State and the municipalities of the net proceeds of State taxes, the determination of the taxes that may be assigned, grants-in-aid, and the measures needed to improve the financial position of the municipalities. Article 243Z leaves the audit of municipal accounts to State law. The constitutional text thus builds a complete financial architecture, of own taxes, assigned revenues, grants and a periodic expert review, and then hands every tap in the building to the State legislature to turn on or leave off. It should be added, because residents write to editors and councillors as though the contrary were true, that the account given in this article is legal information about the constitutional scheme of municipal government, and not advice on any individual dispute with a municipality, for which the State municipal Act and professional advice on the specific facts are the proper guides.

The revenue that a municipality raises by its own authority rests, in every State, on a narrow base. The property tax is the principal municipal tax, and its yield is held down by the assessment practices, exemption patterns and revision intervals of the State framework within which it is levied, so that the tax most naturally suited to a city, a charge on the land and buildings the city services, performs far below its design capacity. User charges for water and other services recover a part of supply cost in most cities and the whole of it in few. The gap between the functions the Twelfth Schedule contemplates and the revenues the municipal fund commands is filled, in the design, by assigned revenues and grants, and it is at this joint that the Union’s Finance Commissions have entered municipal finance directly. The Fifteenth Finance Commission, for the period from 2021 to 2026, recommended grants to urban local bodies divided between untied and tied components, the tied portion directed to sanitation and water, and attached entry-level conditions that speak precisely to the weaknesses of the base: the notification of floor rates for property tax, and accounts audited to a standard a grantor can rely on. A constitutional commission of the Union setting conditions on the property tax administration of a city is a measure of how far the permissive design of Article 243X has travelled from self-government, and of how completely the system’s other actors have accepted that the invitation of 1993, left to the States alone, produces municipalities that are elected, reserved, term-protected and underfunded in roughly equal measure.

Borrowing marks the frontier of municipal finance and its present narrowness. A small number of corporations have raised money directly from the capital market through municipal bonds, beginning with the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s issue of 1998, the first of the modern market, under a framework the Securities and Exchange Board of India put in place in 2015 for municipal debt securities, and the Union has at intervals offered incentives for such issues. The issuers are, without exception in practice, the large corporations with the strongest own revenues and the most professional administrations, which is to say the bodies that need the discipline of the market least and can satisfy its conditions most easily. A bond issue requires audited accounts, a credit rating and a revenue stream a lender can attach, and the municipalities that can produce all three are those whose finances the State framework has already allowed to mature. The bond market therefore measures the same gradient as everything else in this article: financial self-government, like administrative capacity, accumulates where the State has permitted it and is absent where it has not, and the instruments designed to reward the mature do nothing for the rest.

The parastatal layer: who performs the functions instead

If the Twelfth Schedule is a menu from which the State legislature may serve the municipality, the parastatal bodies are the other kitchen. A parastatal, in the vocabulary of Indian urban governance, is a body created by a State statute or by executive decision to perform a public function, governed by a board dominated by officials and nominees, answerable upward to the State government and not downward to any electorate. Development authorities plan the city’s expansion and control its land. Water supply and sewerage boards, constituted under their own statutes in cities such as Bengaluru and Delhi, abstract, treat and distribute the water and carry away the sewage. Slum boards and housing boards hold the land and build the tenements. Transport undertakings run the buses. A later addition to the layer, the special purpose vehicles incorporated as companies under the Smart Cities Mission, took charge of area-based development in the chosen cities, governed by boards on which the elected municipality is one voice among several and not always the strongest. Each of these bodies performs functions that appear, in terms, in the Twelfth Schedule. None of them is a municipality. None of them was touched by the amendment, because the amendment governed municipalities and the parastatals are not municipalities; the functional territory of the city was partitioned before 1993, and Part IXA regulated one partition while the others continued under their own statutes exactly as before.

The following table, the findable artifact of this article, answers the question every urban resident actually has, which is who to hold responsible. It describes a typical large Indian city; the arrangement in any particular city is set by that State’s statutes and must be checked there.

Function	Who performs it in a typical large city	Twelfth Schedule entry
Land use planning	State development authority or town planning department (parastatal or State)	Entry 1, urban planning including town planning
Building permission	The elected municipality	Entry 2, regulation of land use and construction of buildings
Water supply	A State water supply board in many large cities, the municipality in others	Entry 5, water supply for domestic, industrial and commercial purposes
Sewerage and drainage	The water board where one exists, otherwise the municipality	Entry 6, public health, sanitation conservancy and solid waste management
Solid waste	The elected municipality	Entry 6, public health, sanitation conservancy and solid waste management
Roads	Divided: arterial roads often with the State or the development authority, internal roads with the municipality	Entry 4, roads and bridges
Public transport	A State transport undertaking or a special purpose vehicle, rarely the municipality	No direct entry; closest is Entry 17, public amenities
Slum improvement	A State slum board or authority in many States, the municipality in others	Entry 10, slum improvement and upgradation
Parks and street lighting	The elected municipality	Entry 12, urban amenities; Entry 17, public amenities including street lighting

The table teaches its own lesson. The functions the elected municipality most securely holds are the ones a resident can see from the doorstep: refuse, street lights, parks, building permissions, internal roads. The functions that involve land, capital and planning, the decisions that determine what the city will become, sit disproportionately with bodies the resident cannot elect. That distribution is not an accident of administration. Land is the most valuable asset a city government touches, and State governments have been consistently slower to surrender control of land and planning than to surrender the broom and the drain.

The parastatal model has a political economy, and candour requires it to be set out, because it explains why the layer reproduces itself. A development authority controls the conversion of land from rural to urban use and the allotment of developed plots, and land in a growing city is the largest store of value any public body touches; control of it brings revenue, patronage and the power to decide where the city grows. A board that supplies water or runs transport can borrow against its assets and revenues, appoint its engineers and managers without reference to a council, and set its programme on engineering timelines rather than electoral ones. To the State government, the parastatal offers delivery without negotiation: no council resolutions, no reserved-seat arithmetic, no ward-level bargaining, and an appointed board that the government of the day composes. To the resident, the parastatal offers the inverse of the municipality in every particular: competence without a forum, decisions without a debate on the record, and a complaint that must travel to a minister because there is no councillor of the body to receive it. The honest counter-case exists and should be recorded. Some of the functions are genuinely regional: a city’s water source may lie in another district, its commuter rail crosses a dozen municipal boundaries, and a ring road serves a region no single corporation contains, so an agency wider than the municipality is not an evasion but a necessity for those functions. The amendment’s own planning committees concede the point by existing. The criticism is not that regional functions need regional bodies; it is that the regional bodies India built for them were made answerable to the State alone, and the elected regional body the Constitution designed to hold the same territory, the Metropolitan Planning Committee, was left unbuilt while the appointed ones multiplied.

The planning committees: the district, and the metropolis

The amendment’s most original contribution to Indian constitutional design is a pair of committees that sit above the local bodies and exist to plan across their boundaries. The District Planning Committee, under Article 243ZD, is constituted in every State at the district level to consolidate the plans prepared by the panchayats and the municipalities in the district and to prepare a draft development plan for the district as a whole. Its composition is fixed with unusual precision: not less than four fifths of the total number of members shall be elected by, and from amongst, the elected members of the panchayat at the district level and of the municipalities in the district, in proportion to the ratio between the population of the rural areas and of the urban areas in the district. In preparing the draft plan, the committee must have regard to matters of common interest between the panchayats and the municipalities, including spatial planning, the sharing of water and other physical and natural resources, the integrated development of infrastructure and environmental conservation, and to the extent and type of available resources, financial or otherwise; it must consult such institutions and organisations as the Governor may by order specify; and its chairperson forwards the development plan, as recommended by the committee, to the government of the State. The District Planning Committee is the one place in the constitutional scheme where the rural and urban tiers are required to plan together, and the four-fifths elected composition makes it, on paper, the most representative planning body in the country.

Why do metropolitan regions need a planning body above the municipality?

A metropolitan labour market, its water sources, its transport corridors and its land market all ignore municipal boundaries, while every institution that taxes and spends stops at them. A planning committee for the whole area is the amendment’s answer to that mismatch: one table at which every municipality and panchayat in the region must sit.

The Metropolitan Planning Committee, under Article 243ZE, is the district committee’s larger sibling, constituted in every metropolitan area to prepare a draft development plan for the metropolitan area as a whole. Not less than two thirds of its members shall be elected by, and from amongst, the elected members of the municipalities and the chairpersons of the panchayats in the metropolitan area, in proportion to the ratio between the population of the municipalities and of the panchayats in that area. The committee must have regard to the plans prepared by the municipalities and the panchayats in the area, to matters of common interest between them, including coordinated spatial planning, the sharing of water and other resources, integrated infrastructure development and environmental conservation, to the overall objectives and priorities set by the Government of India and the government of the State, and to the extent and nature of investments likely to be made in the area by agencies of both governments; its chairperson likewise forwards the recommended plan to the State government. The design is coherent and even elegant: the region that functions as one economy is to be planned as one territory, by a body in which the elected representatives of its constituent local governments hold a guaranteed two-thirds majority.

One clause of Article 243ZE marks the committee’s intended place in the order of governments, and it has no counterpart in the district provision. The Metropolitan Planning Committee must have regard not only to the local plans and the matters of common interest but also to the overall objectives and priorities set by the Government of India and the government of the State, and to the extent and nature of the investments likely to be made in the metropolitan area by agencies of both governments. The committee is thus designed as a meeting point of three planning streams: the plans rising from the municipalities and panchayats, the objectives descending from the two senior governments, and the investment programmes of the agencies, most of them parastatals, that would execute much of the plan. No other body in the constitutional scheme is charged with reconciling the three, and the metropolitan area is the one territory where all three are always in motion at once. The clause is the textual answer to the argument that a committee of local representatives would plan in ignorance of national and State priorities: the priorities are written into its considerations, and its elected majority is trusted to weigh them against the plans of the bodies that sent it.

Why does the Constitution prescribe the committees but not their powers?

Because the amendment constitutionalises composition and leaves function to State law, the same division it uses for municipalities themselves. Articles 243ZD and 243ZE fix who must sit on each committee and in what proportion, then invite the State Legislature to assign functions relating to planning, an invitation some States have answered thinly or not at all.

Both committees share a design assumption that deserves scrutiny, because its failure explains much of the record that follows. A District Planning Committee consolidates the plans prepared by the panchayats and the municipalities; a Metropolitan Planning Committee has regard to the plans prepared by the municipalities and panchayats of the area. The provisions presuppose that the constituent bodies prepare plans. For most municipalities, planning of the kind the text imagines, a development plan for the municipal area prepared by the elected body, is not an activity the body performs, because town planning under the State Acts sits with the development authority or the town planning department, and the municipality’s own forward documents are budgets and scheme proposals rather than plans. The committees are therefore asked to consolidate, at the district and metropolitan levels, documents that the system’s allocation of the planning function does not generate at the base. Where the base documents exist, as in Kerala’s decentralised planning, the consolidation has content; where they do not, the committee’s meeting becomes the ratification of plans prepared by the district administration and the parastatals, and the elected four fifths lend their presence to a process whose papers they did not write. The defect is not hypocrisy but sequence: the amendment constitutionalised the apex of a planning pyramid and left the base of the pyramid in the permissive column with everything else.

The compliance record is the amendment’s plainest failure. K. C. Sivaramakrishnan, the former Union urban development secretary whose studies of metropolitan governance remain the standard account of the amendment’s working, concluded after two decades that the Metropolitan Planning Committees “have not been set up anywhere except in Kolkata, where it is moribund, and in Mumbai, where it is dysfunctional”. West Bengal constituted the Kolkata Metropolitan Planning Committee in 2001, a body of sixty members of whom forty are elected, with the Kolkata Metropolitan Development Authority serving as its secretariat; Maharashtra constituted a committee for the Mumbai metropolitan region. Between them they stand nearly alone, and neither displaced the development authority model in its own region. The Kolkata committee’s working scheme, as its documentation describes it, is organised around a perspective plan for the long term, a draft development plan for the medium term and annual plans for implementation, prepared through the development authority acting as its secretariat, which is to say that the one functioning metropolitan committee in the country performs its constitutional role through the staff and machinery of the parastatal it was designed to supersede as the region’s planner. Even compliance, where it occurred, arrived in the parastatal’s clothing. Sivaramakrishnan’s explanation for the omission is quoted wherever this subject is seriously discussed: the committee is regarded by State governments as a potential source of counter power to the State, a body elected indirectly from every council in the region and mandated to plan the region’s land and water, and a State that will not surrender planning to its own capital’s corporation is unlikely to surrender it to a committee of the whole metropolis.

The district committee’s record is better and remains uneven. District Planning Committees exist in form across the States, as Article 243ZD required, but in a number of States the State legislation places a minister of the State government in the committee’s chair, a choice the Constitution leaves open and the design’s logic discourages, because a committee four fifths elected and chaired by a member of the government whose plans it is meant to consolidate sits closer to the administration than to the local bodies. Kerala is the standing exception in the literature: its campaign for decentralised planning, launched in 1996, routed a substantial share of the State’s plan funds through local plans and made the District Planning Committee the point at which panchayat and municipal plans were integrated into a district whole, so the committee acquired there the function the text describes. Elsewhere the consolidation the article commands is often performed by the district administration and ratified by the committee, the same inversion of form and substance that marks the wards committees. The two planning committees therefore stand at different points of the same slope: the district body exists and frequently underperforms its design; the metropolitan body, for most regions that qualify for one, does not exist at all.

Two features of the committees’ legal position explain why their underperformance carries so little consequence. The first is the destination of their work: the chairperson forwards the development plan to the government of the State, and the text prescribes no duty in the State government to adopt it, to act on it within any period, or to explain a departure from it, so the plan enters the State’s own planning process as an input of constitutional dignity and ordinary weight. The second is the secretariat: a committee has no establishment of its own in the text, and in practice its papers are kept and its drafts prepared by the district planning office or the development authority that serves as its secretariat, which is how the Kolkata committee came to work through the metropolitan development authority it might have been expected to direct. A body whose output is advisory, whose staff is borrowed and whose chairmanship the State law may give to a minister is a body designed to be safe to ignore, and the States’ record with the two committees is the record of institutions being used exactly to the extent of their design and no further. The contrast with the election provisions is the sharpest in the whole Part: there, the text fixed a period and the courts supplied a remedy, and the duty is performed; here, the text fixed a composition and no period and no remedy, and the duty is performed where a State finds the performance convenient.

The courts have been asked to close the gap and have declined to do by judgment what the States omitted to do by notification. In Bondu Ramaswamy v. Bangalore Development Authority (2010), residents challenging land acquisition by the Bangalore Development Authority argued that after the insertion of Part IXA a development plan for a metropolitan area could be drawn up only by a Metropolitan Planning Committee, and that the development authority’s statutory power had run out. The Supreme Court recorded the factual foundation of the argument and its limit: the Governor had not specified a Bangalore metropolitan area for the purpose, and neither a metropolitan area under Article 243P nor a Metropolitan Planning Committee was in existence, although the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act had been amended to insert a provision, Section 503B, for constituting such a committee. The Court distinguished a development scheme of the kind a development authority prepares, acquisition, layout formation, roads, drainage and allotment, from the development plan for a metropolitan area as a whole that a planning committee prepares, held that the two are not the same instrument, and rejected the contention that the development authority had lost its authority. The judgment is a precise map of the constitutional position: the mandate of Article 243ZE is real, its non-performance carries no automatic consequence for the bodies that plan in the committee’s absence, and the remedy for a missing committee is political, because a court will record the omission but will not constitute the committee itself.

A further layering completes the planning picture, because the committees’ draft plans do not enter an empty field. The operative land use plan of an Indian city, the document against which building permission and development control are actually administered, is the development plan or master plan prepared under the State’s town and country planning legislation, in most large cities by the development authority under that legislation. The District Planning Committee’s district plan and the Metropolitan Planning Committee’s metropolitan plan are constitutional instruments without a corresponding statutory machinery of enforcement: no permission is refused because it offends the committee’s draft, and no authority is bound to conform the master plan to it. Three planning systems therefore coexist in the same territory, the parastatal’s statutory master plan, the municipality’s budgetary and scheme documents, and the committees’ constitutional drafts, ranked in force in exactly the reverse of their democratic pedigree. The committees were designed as the point at which the three would be reconciled by the elected element common to them. In their absence, reconciliation happens inside the State government, which owns the first system, funds the second and receives the third, when the third exists, as a recommendation addressed to itself.

The rural mirror

Part IXA was drafted as the twin of Part IX, and the comparison disciplines any reading of either. The rural instrument, examined in the series pillar on the 73rd Amendment and Panchayati Raj, uses the same architecture: a threefold structure, direct election, reservation in the same proportions, a five-year term with the same dissolution discipline, a State Election Commission, a State Finance Commission whose remit covers both tiers, and a schedule of subjects, twenty-nine in the Eleventh Schedule against eighteen in the Twelfth, devolved by the same permissive formula. The differences are as instructive as the parallels. The village has the Gram Sabha, the assembly of all voters, as a constitutional body at its base; the city has no equivalent assembly of residents, and the Wards Committee is a committee of representatives, not a meeting of the governed. The rural tiers are nested, village, intermediate and district, within one system; the urban types are alternatives, one body for one area, and the city must look to the planning committees for the coordination the district tier gives the village system internally. And the rural amendment governs a world in which the State’s rival institutions were comparatively weak, while the urban amendment entered territory already occupied by development authorities, boards and corporations departmentalised under State control, which is one reason the urban text has had the harder life.

One further asymmetry between the twins deserves record, because it drives the metropolitan problem from below. The panchayat system is a ladder: the village body answers upward to the intermediate and district tiers, and the district tier gives the system a head at the scale of the district. The municipal system is a set of parallel bodies with no ladder between them: a Nagar Panchayat and a municipal corporation differ in size and dignity but not in rank, and above the largest corporation there is no urban tier at all, no elected body of the city region to which the corporation belongs. The metropolitan area, the one urban territory larger than the municipality that the Constitution recognises, was given a committee rather than a tier, a planning body rather than a government, and the recurring proposals for metropolitan government in India, for an elected authority of the whole urban region on the analogy of the great city governments of other federations, are proposals to build the missing rung. The amendment’s authors saw the territory and declined the rung, and the development authority, unelected and State-appointed, occupies the space where the rung would have been.

The missing urban assembly has acquired an informal substitute, and it is worth naming because it shapes how city residents actually experience participation. The residents’ welfare association, a voluntary body of a housing colony or apartment complex, has become in the large cities the forum in which residents meet, raise service complaints, negotiate with the corporation’s local officers and organise at election time. It has no constitutional or statutory status in the general law, no franchise beyond its membership, and a social base that skews towards property owners in planned colonies, leaving the residents of informal settlements to organise through other channels or none. The comparison writes itself: the village received a constitutional assembly of all its voters and the city received a committee of its representatives, and into the space between the committee and the citizen the voluntary association moved, performing the Gram Sabha’s neighbourhood functions for those neighbourhoods organised enough to sustain it. A complete account of urban self-government in India has to hold both facts at once: the constitutional design omitted the urban crowd, and the urban crowd, in its more prosperous quarters, built itself a substitute that the design neither authorised nor can be made to answer for its exclusions.

A text that has not moved

One measure of the amendment’s settlement is that Part IXA stands substantially in the form in which it was enacted. Constitutional litigation has moved around it, State statutes have been rewritten beneath it, and the Union has legislated and spent across its territory through missions and Finance Commission grants, but the articles from 243P to 243ZG have not required repair, because the arguments about urban government in India are not arguments about what the text says. They are arguments about the distribution the text chose: mandatory form, permissive power. A proposal to amend Part IXA would have to declare which side of that distribution it wished to move, functions into the mandatory column, or the executive into the constitutional text, or the planning committees into consequence-backed duties, and no government has yet been willing to pay the federal price of declaring it. The text’s stability is therefore not evidence that the questions are settled. It is evidence that the questions were priced in 1992 and the invoice has been left, deliberately and by every successor government, unpaid.

Assessment: an elected city and an administered city

What the amendment achieved should not be understated, because its mandatory core has held. Municipal elections in India are regular in a way they were not before 1993, and where a State has tested the boundary, by delaying delimitation, by pleading an unfinished reservation exercise, or by administrative drift, the Supreme Court has enforced the term in Kishansing Tomar and again in Suresh Mahajan with a consistency that has made timely election the settled expectation of the system. Supersession, the casual instrument of the old regime, survives only inside a six-month clock and a remainder term. Reservation has changed who sits in the council chamber of every city in the country, permanently and by constitutional command. A municipal councillor holds an office the Constitution recognises, in a body the Constitution requires, for a term the Constitution protects. None of that was true in 1992, and the distance travelled is the amendment’s genuine monument.

The pattern of enforcement explains the pattern of achievement, and it is a pattern about remedies rather than about judicial will. A court can enforce the election provisions because they state a duty, a date and a default: the term expires, the election has not been held, the mandamus issues. A court cannot enforce Article 243W, because the provision states a permission addressed to a legislature, and there is no default to correct and no date to miss; a judgment directing a State to devolve the Twelfth Schedule would be a judgment writing the devolution statute, fixing its functions, its staff and its money, which is legislation in everything but name. The same is true of the planning committees, as Bondu Ramaswamy demonstrates: the duty to constitute is mandatory in form, but its breach generates no consequence the court can administer, since the court cannot compose the committee, staff it and set it planning. The judiciary’s role in the life of Part IXA is therefore exactly as large as the mandatory text allows and no larger, and assessments that blame the courts for the permissive remainder mistake the location of the choice. The choice was made in the drafting, and it is revisited, if it is revisited, in legislatures.

What the amendment did not achieve is the rest of self-government. Functions remain devolved at State pleasure under a provision written in the permissive mood, and the record of what has actually been transferred, State by State and function by function, is kept by the series article on panchayat devolution and its implementation, which owns that record for both tiers. Finances remain dependent, because the taxes a city may levy are the taxes a State Act authorises, and the State Finance Commission recommends into a legislature that is free to file the recommendation away. The executive remains appointed, the mayor remains, in most States, a presiding officer with a shorter tenure than the administration the mayor nominally leads, and the planning committees that were to give the district and the metropolis an elected planning mind exist, for most of urban India, only in the text of Articles 243ZD and 243ZE. A researcher assembling the record of a single city’s government, its notifications, supersession orders, delimitation exercises and committee papers, does the work of accountability that the structure itself leaves undone, and keeping those papers in order is a discipline of its own; readers who follow a municipality closely, councillors and reporters among them, will find the working method set out in the account of how journalists use VaultBook to protect sources directly transferable to a ward-level file.

There is a federal paradox at the centre of the settlement, and the assessment is incomplete without it. Local government is a State subject, and the amendment that constitutionalised it is an act of the Union’s constituent power, ratified by the States, prescribing the internal structure of a State field in greater detail than the Constitution prescribes for most Union fields. The paradox has a practical consequence that runs in the opposite direction from the one usually drawn. Because the floor is constitutional and uniform, the differences between States are thrown entirely onto the permissive remainder, which is where governance actually happens; so the amendment simultaneously made Indian municipalities more alike in form than they had ever been and left them as different in power as they had ever been. A corporation in a State that devolved functions, funds and an executive mayor and a corporation in a State that devolved nothing wear the same constitutional dress, and a reader comparing them through Part IXA alone would conclude they were the same institution. They are not, and the distance between them is the true map of Indian urban federalism.

The amendment also rebuilt the country’s political recruitment, an effect its text never mentions and its operation made unavoidable. The two amendments of 1992 together created the largest elected arena in the Republic, counted in millions of offices at the rural tier and in tens of thousands of council seats in the cities, with a third or more of the urban seats reserved for women and the offices of chairpersons opened by reservation in rotation. Municipal office became, in the generation after 1993, the first rung of a political career in a way it had not been when councils were intermittent and powerless: the ward is where a future legislator learns the casework, the faction management and the delivery politics of a constituency, at a scale small enough to be learned young. Whatever the amendment failed to give the city as government, it gave the Republic a school of politicians, and the alumni of the municipal councils are present in every State legislature and in Parliament in numbers no one counted in 1992.

The reform menu that the debate has assembled follows from the diagnosis, and its items are worth separating because they are often merged. One item is executive: give the mayor executive authority and a term coextensive with the council’s, by direct election or by a mayor-in-council, the direction the Second Administrative Reforms Commission recommended and States such as Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal have partly travelled. A second item is functional: convert the permissive devolution of Article 243W into a defined transfer, function by function, of the kind the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution urged when it recommended that the subjects of the Eleventh and Twelfth Schedules be entrusted to the local bodies in fact. A third item is fiscal: widen and modernise the municipal tax base, beginning with the property tax, so that own revenue bears a proportion of expenditure closer to the proportion of blame. A fourth item is metropolitan: constitute the planning committees, or replace them with a metropolitan authority that is elected rather than appointed, so the regional functions the parastatals perform acquire an elected owner. The items differ in their federal cost, and the order in which governments have found them affordable is the order of their distance from State control: the fiscal item, which costs the State little authority, has advanced furthest; the metropolitan item, which costs the State its planning power, has advanced least. The amendment’s permissive clauses predict that ordering exactly, which is the strongest evidence that the ordering is structural and not accidental.

For the reader who must retain the amendment in examinable form, the structure reduces to a small set of load-bearing facts, each attached to its article. Three types of municipality under Article 243Q, classified by the Governor against stated factors, with no population figures in the constitutional text. Direct election from wards under Article 243R, with nominated experts who may not vote. Wards Committees under Article 243S at a population of three lakh or more. Reservation under Article 243T, proportional for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, not less than one third for women, permissive for backward classes on conditions the courts have specified. Five years under Article 243U, election before expiry or within six months of dissolution, the successor taking the remainder only. Permissive devolution under Article 243W across the eighteen matters of the Twelfth Schedule. Elections under the State Election Commission in Article 243ZA. A District Planning Committee under Article 243ZD with not less than four fifths elected, consolidating panchayat and municipal plans; a Metropolitan Planning Committee under Article 243ZE with not less than two thirds elected, for every metropolitan area of ten lakh or more. Hold those, and the cases arrange themselves: Kishansing Tomar for the term, Suresh Mahajan for the hierarchy between reservation process and election duty, Bondu Ramaswamy for the planning committee that was not there.

The verdict follows from the claim with which this article began. The 74th Amendment is best understood not as a failed transfer of power but as a successful transfer of legitimacy without a corresponding transfer of government. It decided, definitively, that Indian cities are to be governed by bodies their residents elect, and it enforced that decision against every device by which States had previously postponed it. It declined to decide who within the city government holds power, what the city government may do, or what money it may raise, and on those questions the older order, State-made and State-controlled, continues inside the new constitutional rooms. A reform that changes the composition of an institution without changing its executive changes who answers questions in the council chamber. It does not change who answers for the water.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What did the 74th Amendment establish?

It established municipalities as constitutional bodies. The Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992 inserted Part IXA, Articles 243P to 243ZG, and the Twelfth Schedule into the Constitution, and came into force on 1 June 1993. Before it, a municipality existed only under a State statute and could be superseded indefinitely. The amendment required three types of municipality in every State, direct election from wards, reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women, a five-year term protected by an election discipline, elections conducted by the State Election Commission, and District and Metropolitan Planning Committees, while leaving functions, finances and the executive to State law.

Q: What are the three types of municipality?

Article 243Q provides for a Nagar Panchayat for a transitional area, an area in transition from a rural area to an urban area; a Municipal Council for a smaller urban area; and a Municipal Corporation for a larger urban area. The Governor constitutes each type by public notification, having regard to the population of the area, its density, the revenue generated for local administration, the percentage of employment in non-agricultural activities, the economic importance of the area and other factors the Governor deems fit. The Constitution fixes no population figures for the three types; the numerical bands that classify a town in practice are prescribed by the State municipal Acts and differ between States.

Q: What is a Ward Committee and when is it required?

A Ward Committee is a committee of one or more wards within a municipality, constituted under Article 243S. It is required in every municipality having a population of three lakh or more, population being measured on the last preceding census of which the figures have been published. The member of the municipality representing a ward within the committee’s area sits on the committee, and where the committee consists of a single ward, that ward’s member chairs it. Beyond this, the composition of the committee, its territorial area and the manner in which its seats are filled are left to the State legislature, as are the functions it performs, which in most States are consultative.

Q: Which functions does the Twelfth Schedule list for municipalities?

The Twelfth Schedule lists eighteen matters: urban planning including town planning; regulation of land use and construction of buildings; planning for economic and social development; roads and bridges; water supply for domestic, industrial and commercial purposes; public health, sanitation conservancy and solid waste management; fire services; urban forestry, protection of the environment and promotion of ecological aspects; safeguarding the interests of weaker sections of society, including the handicapped and mentally retarded in the Schedule’s words; slum improvement and upgradation; urban poverty alleviation; provision of urban amenities and facilities such as parks, gardens and playgrounds; promotion of cultural, educational and aesthetic aspects; burials and burial grounds and cremations and cremation grounds; cattle pounds and prevention of cruelty to animals; vital statistics including registration of births and deaths; public amenities including street lighting, parking lots, bus stops and public conveniences; and regulation of slaughter houses and tanneries.

Q: What plans does a District Planning Committee consolidate?

Under Article 243ZD, the District Planning Committee consolidates the plans prepared by the panchayats and the municipalities in the district, and on that basis prepares a draft development plan for the district as a whole. In preparing the plan it must have regard to matters of common interest between the panchayats and the municipalities, including spatial planning, the sharing of water and other physical and natural resources, the integrated development of infrastructure and environmental conservation, and to the extent and type of available resources, financial or otherwise. The committee’s chairperson then forwards the development plan, as recommended by the committee, to the government of the State.

Q: Which areas require a Metropolitan Planning Committee?

A Metropolitan Planning Committee is required in every metropolitan area, under Article 243ZE. A metropolitan area, as Article 243P defines it, is an area having a population of ten lakh or more, comprised in one or more districts and consisting of two or more municipalities or panchayats or other contiguous areas, specified by the Governor by public notification to be a metropolitan area for the purposes of Part IXA. The committee prepares a draft development plan for the metropolitan area as a whole. Although the requirement is stated in mandatory terms, committees have in fact been constituted in very few metropolitan areas, Kolkata and Mumbai being the standard examples given in the literature.

Q: Who actually runs a municipal corporation?

In practice, the Municipal Commissioner. Under the typical State municipal corporation Act, executive authority vests in a Commissioner appointed by the State government, usually drawn from the Indian Administrative Service or the State services in the large corporations. The Commissioner heads the administration, directs the municipal staff, executes contracts, prepares the budget and answers for service delivery. The mayor presides over the corporation, chairs its meetings and represents the city, but does not appoint, transfer or remove the Commissioner or the staff. The Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act does not mention the Commissioner at all; the office, its powers and its accountability to the State government come entirely from the State statute.

Q: Why are mayors in India described as weak?

Because the office combines visibility with very little executive power. In most States the mayor is elected by the councillors rather than by the city’s voters, and the mayoral term fixed by the State Act is often shorter than the council’s five years, two and a half years in Maharashtra and one year in Bengaluru. The mayor presides over the corporation and represents the city ceremonially, while administration, staff, contracts and the preparation of the budget belong to a Municipal Commissioner appointed by and answerable to the State government. The position is not universal: Madhya Pradesh elects its mayors directly, and Kolkata works through a mayor-in-council with executive authority, which shows the weakness is a product of State law rather than of the Constitution.

Q: Does the Twelfth Schedule hand its eighteen functions to municipalities automatically?

No. The operative provision is Article 243W, and it is permissive: the State legislature may by law endow municipalities with powers and authority, and such a law may provide for the devolution of powers and responsibilities in relation to the matters listed in the Twelfth Schedule. The Schedule is therefore a list of matters available for devolution, not a transfer effected by the Constitution itself. A function binds a municipality, and can be claimed against it, only when the State municipal law assigns that function to it. This is why accounts stating that the Twelfth Schedule functions stand transferred to municipalities by the amendment misstate the law, and why the actual functional position differs from State to State.

Q: What happens if a municipality is dissolved before its five years are over?

Article 243U requires an election to constitute the successor municipality to be completed before the expiration of six months from the date of dissolution, unless the remainder of the dissolved municipality’s term is less than six months, in which case no election is required for that remainder. In the interval, the municipality is administered by an administrator appointed under the State Act. The body elected after the dissolution does not receive a fresh five-year term: it continues only for the remainder of the period for which the dissolved municipality would have continued. Dissolution therefore cannot be used to reset the city’s electoral calendar, which is the discipline that distinguishes it from the indefinite supersessions of the period before the amendment.

Q: What conditions must a State satisfy before reserving municipal seats for backward classes?

Article 243T(6) permits a State legislature to reserve seats and chairperson offices for backward classes, but the Supreme Court has attached conditions. In K. Krishna Murthy v. Union of India (2010), a Constitution Bench upheld such reservation while requiring an empirical basis in relation to local bodies and observance of the ceiling on total reservation. In Vikas Kishanrao Gawali v. State of Maharashtra (2021), the Court stated the triple test: a dedicated commission must conduct a rigorous empirical inquiry into the nature and implications of backwardness in the local bodies concerned; the proportion of reservation must be specified on the basis of the commission’s recommendations; and the reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the backward classes together must not ordinarily exceed fifty per cent of the seats.

Q: How is the Mayor or chairperson of a municipality chosen?

The Constitution does not say. Article 243R leaves the manner of election of the chairperson of a municipality to the State legislature, and the States have answered differently. In most States the mayor or chairperson is elected indirectly, by the councillors from among themselves, and serves the term the State Act prescribes, which may be shorter than the council’s term. Madhya Pradesh provides for mayors elected directly by the voters of the city, who hold their mandate for the council’s full term. The offices of chairpersons are also subject to reservation for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and women in the manner State law provides under Article 243T, and the reserved offices are allotted in the rotation the State law prescribes.

Q: Why may an industrial township have no elected municipality?

Because of the proviso built into Article 243Q. The Governor may specify an area as an industrial township where municipal services are provided or are proposed to be provided by an industrial establishment in that area, and for such a specified area the article does not require a municipality to be constituted. The reasoning is functional: in a company town, the establishment already supplies water, roads, sanitation, housing and the other municipal services, and an elected municipality would duplicate an existing administration. The cost of the exception is democratic: residents of an industrial township receive municipal services without electing the body that provides them, and their civic entitlements run against the establishment and the State rather than against a council of their own choosing.

Q: What is the minimum age for contesting a municipal election?

Twenty-one years, by force of a proviso in Article 243V. That article disqualifies a person for municipal membership if the person is disqualified under the law governing elections to the State legislature or under a law made by the State legislature, which would ordinarily import a minimum age of twenty-five. The proviso then provides that no person shall be disqualified on the ground that the person is less than twenty-five years of age, if the person has attained the age of twenty-one years. The floor for contesting a municipal election is therefore twenty-one, lower than the floor for the State legislature, reflecting the design of local office as the entry level of elected politics. Other disqualifications, including those added by State law, apply independently of age.

Q: Who sits in a municipality besides its elected councillors?

Article 243R allows the State legislature to add three further elements to the directly elected councillors. It may provide representation for persons having special knowledge or experience in municipal administration, who may take part in the meetings but have no right to vote in them. It may provide for the members of the House of the People and of the State Legislative Assembly whose constituencies comprise wholly or partly the municipal area. And it may provide for members of the Council of States and of the State Legislative Council who are registered as electors within the municipal area, and for the chairpersons of the Wards Committees. Which of these elements a given council contains depends on the State Act, so the composition of two councils in different States can differ even though both rest on the same elected core.

Q: What did the Supreme Court hold about municipal election timing in Kishansing Tomar?

In Kishansing Tomar v. Municipal Corporation of the City of Ahmedabad (2006) 8 SCC 352, a Constitution Bench held that elections to a municipality must be completed before the expiration of the five-year duration fixed by Article 243U. The Court held that the State Election Commission must not put forward administrative excuses, such as incomplete delimitation of wards or unfinished revision of electoral rolls, for failing to complete the election in time; revision of rolls must be carried out in time, and if it cannot be, the election must be held on the rolls in force. It also held that the State Election Commission, for elections to panchayats and municipalities under Articles 243K and 243ZA, enjoys the same status and amplitude of power as the Election Commission of India under Article 324.

Q: What must a District Planning Committee take into account when it prepares the district plan?

Article 243ZD(3) specifies the regard list. In preparing the draft development plan for the district, the committee must have regard to matters of common interest between the panchayats and the municipalities, including spatial planning, the sharing of water and other physical and natural resources, the integrated development of infrastructure and environmental conservation. It must also have regard to the extent and type of available resources, whether financial or otherwise. And it must consult such institutions and organisations as the Governor may, by order, specify. The list tells the committee what kind of body it is meant to be: not a clearing house that staples local plans together, but the forum in which the rural and urban claims on the same water, land and infrastructure are reconciled against the resources actually available.

Q: What is a development authority, and how is it different from a municipality?

A development authority is a statutory body created by a State law, such as a town and country planning Act or a dedicated development authority Act, to plan and develop a city or region: it prepares the master or development plan, controls land use and development, acquires and develops land and allots plots. It differs from a municipality in every element of its constitution. Its members are appointed by the State government, not elected; it answers to the State government, not to the city’s voters; its defining functions, planning and land, are drawn from the same Twelfth Schedule territory that Article 243W makes available to municipalities; and it is not subject to the five-year electoral discipline of Part IXA. The Bangalore Development Authority considered in Bondu Ramaswamy v. Bangalore Development Authority (2010) is the standard example in the case law.

Q: What is the difference between a District Planning Committee and a Metropolitan Planning Committee?

The two committees differ in territory, in composition and in the plan they produce. The District Planning Committee, under Article 243ZD, is constituted for a district, consolidates the plans of the panchayats and municipalities in the district and prepares a draft development plan for the district as a whole; not less than four fifths of its members are elected by and from among the elected members of the district panchayat and the municipalities, in proportion to the rural and urban populations. The Metropolitan Planning Committee, under Article 243ZE, is constituted for a metropolitan area, an area of ten lakh or more population spanning two or more municipalities or panchayats, and prepares a draft development plan for that area; not less than two thirds of its members are elected by and from among the elected members of the municipalities and the chairpersons of the panchayats in the area, in proportion to their populations.

Q: Who draws the ward boundaries for a municipal election?

The delimitation of wards is carried out under the State municipal law, not by the Constitution and not, in the design of most State Acts, by the State Election Commission. Part IXA requires the municipal area to be divided into territorial constituencies known as wards, from which councillors are directly elected, but the authority that determines the number of wards and draws their boundaries is the one the State Act names, which in several States is the State government itself, acting by notification. The State Election Commission then conducts the election across the wards as delimited and applies the reservation and rotation determined under the State framework. This allocation has been litigated: when delimitation or the reservation exercise is left incomplete as an election falls due, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Suresh Mahajan v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2022) requires the election to proceed on the wards as they stood when it fell due.