With no hiring guidelines, municipalities largely run on contractual staff

The Haryana government has this year decided to set up a structure for recruitment to its state municipal corporations and municipalities. Other states in Northern India are expected to follow suit. This is a big deal and is a major component of urban reforms in India, given that most municipal bodies in any urban area make do with contractual staff. For instance, the Navi Mumbai municipal corporation has over 8000 contract staff out of a total employee strength of less than 15,000.

 

In the national capital, the last time the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) recruited in large numbers was more than two decades ago. If you look at the municipal corporations of Mumbai or Bengaluru, official recruitment is only for specialists, usually medical personnel.

 

That all the urban geographies of India are poorly managed is in no small measure because of the malaise of recruitment, or the lack of it. There are no specialists in most cities to tackle areas of emerging functions like public-private partnerships, social development, citizen partnership, environmental sustainability, e-governance, and others. The top jobs in most major metros, such as the municipal commissioner and departmental heads are held by officers from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). At the state level, most of the senior posts are also staffed by IAS officers but this does not happen in the third tier. The MCD, for instance, has only six IAS and allied services officers as the commissioner and additional commissioners. But this is still better than a decade ago, when only two such officers were there. For the rest, the systems of promotion are subject to myriad court orders, often because there is no pattern of recruitment in the first place.  

 

The major contributor to this problem is not a lack of qualified persons, but regulation: Of the 4041 statutory towns in India with an estimated staff strength of close to 75 lakh employees, hardly any have the right to recruit for themselves.

 

Data shows that in most states, recruitments on compassionate grounds were the primary path to fill vacancies in lower grades, due to a ban on recruitment for decades.  While employees at the officer level are supposed to be recruited by the state level public service commissions, there is no uniform rule across states. As a result, the municipal services have become vast sinkholes for getting into quasi-government posts, something which is highly regarded in middle India.

 

It is in this context that the decision of the Haryana cabinet to ask its state public service commission to devise a method of exams to select a pool of what is known as Group A and B officers stands out.

 

It will hopefully begin to plug the gap in recruitment practices. Even now despite the Haryana government initiative, the selection at the lower levels will remain a cause for concern. There is no prescribed formula for how employees ranging from teachers to sanitation staff are picked. As a result, over the years, the process has become highly vitiated.

 

Also, as more cities pop up on the horizon, the malaise spreads. Census data from 2011 shows the number of towns and cities have increased from 5161 in 2001 to 7935 in 2011. That number is likely to hit close to 9000 once numbers from the new Census - whenever it is conducted - are collated.

 

The process of recruitment at the third tier of governance has not been examined by any report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. Unlike the central government, where staff selection is strictly controlled by the Union Public Service Commission and the Staff Selection Commission, or at the state level where the Public Service Commission does the needful, those for municipalities are completely ad-hoc and haphazard. 

 

About a decade ago, recognising the problem, the National Institute of Urban Affairs released a report to develop a dedicated municipal cadre. Named the Capacity Building for Urban Development project, it was a partnership programme between the union ministry of urban development (now MoHUA), and the World Bank. Detailing the pitfalls, the report estimated that a national level municipal cadre to be managed by a municipal recruitment board at each state could be a workable template for municipal bodies across the country. It suggested a detailed timeline of 24 months to make such a cadre operational, but that project has been a non-starter.

 

Meanwhile, municipalities are left to their own devices to hire staff. If one takes a walk around East Delhi’s Lakshmi Nagar area, one can spot several staffing agencies which claim to offer jobs for municipal roles.

 

The ad hoc methods of augmenting lower level staffing requirements are followed in other states, too. Besides regular and deputation staff, a sizeable number of personnel are engaged in Group C and D on daily wages jobs at best, or on contract, at worst. The departments overwhelmingly running on contract are sanitation, particularly garbage collection, vector control measures, and maintenance of public gardens. This creates its own challenges. In February this year, the more than 8,000 contractual workers employed with the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation declared a short strike, seeking equal pay for equal work, bringing many municipal functions to a halt.

 

In the interim, public infrastructure and the citizens both continue to pay the price of often sub-standard, unregulated municipal hirings.