[mpisgmedia] Hyderabad to Greater Hyderabad

(From the FOIL list)
Hyderabad turned into Great Hyderabad by amalgamating
12 satellite municipalities and several villages by a
Government order on April 17th. The amalgamation was
opposed by all political parties except the Congress.
The biggest loser in this will be the Majlis which
controls about 40 of the 100 seats in the present
corporation and thus is the single largest party in
the house. but in greater hyderabad this power will be
lost. municipal elections which are due now will
probably postponed by at least 6 months -- although
under the 74th amendment it will be difficult to
postpone indefinitely. that means the special officcer
of the greater hyderabad corporation will have a
freehand --- not that even with an elected body in
place IAS officers were not in complete control of the
municipal affairs. the new special officer and chief
commissioner who took charge is the former irrigation
secretary who was very loyal to the chief minister YS
Rajasekhar Reddy in pushing through a number of highly
irregular and very expensive irrigation projects.
at one level, the amalgamation leads to greater
functional integration ---for instance the urban
development authority will no longer be an independent
body but will be renamed as metro development
authority and will be functioning in the municipality
itself. but it also means that in the highly
fragmented city -- with no coherent urban politics, we
will have an extremely undemocratic governance system
which will be accessible only to transnational actors
and that includes the new middle class led civil
society organizations. I feel a little shaken myself
-- the high court and the supreme court both struck
down cases filed by the MIM and others on grounds that
the judiciary cannot interfere in policy decisions and
that there was nothing unconstitutional about the
amalgamation. Int the last 10 years Hyderabad has
grown unrecognizable to many of us who grew up there,
i think it will be like a foreign country in another
five years.

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