The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in a report, “State Finances, Study of Budgets of 2021-22”, released in November 2021, wrote: “With the third-tier governments in India playing a frontline role in combating the pandemic by implementing containment strategies, healthcare,... their finances have come under severe strain, forcing them to cut down expenditures and mobilise funding from various sources.”
The RBI further commented that the functional autonomy of civic bodies must increase and their governance structure strengthened. This could happen by ‘empowering them financially through higher resource availability’.
