The Supreme Court judgment on the Chandigarh mayoral election gives us a good occasion to think more broadly about elections to municipalities. Elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies are impressive democratic exercises in terms of timeliness of elections, the manner in which they are convened, and the clockwork nature in which power is transferred from one government to another. But elections to “first-mile” governments, i.e., panchayats and municipalities, is another matter altogether. The Court has only intervened to right one wrong in one city. A lot more remains to be done to strengthen first-mile governments in India.
The first issue with respect to municipal elections is that they are not being held on time. This is in violation of the Constitution. As per Janaagraha’s Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems 2023 study, over 1,400 municipalities did not have elected councils in place, as of September 2021 (Table 1).
Table 1 | The table shows urban local governments without elected councils across States and UTs.
