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Scope for bottom-up planning in Kolkata: rhetoric vs reality

Environmental Design Building, Campus Box 314, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309, USA, pal{at}colorado.edu

This paper describes the process of metropolitan planning and decision making in Kolkata, India. Despite widespread belief that West Bengal has been a pioneer in democratic decentralization in India, this paper argues that the dominance of one political party and its hierarchical structure has thwarted the scope for effective bottom-up metropolitan planning in Kolkata. It questions the unchallenged dominance of partisan political actors in public decision making at the local level, and suggests a greater role for non-partisan and locally based civil society organizations. The case also demonstrates that these processes call for expertise in communicative people-centred practices and for shrewd strategic actors who understand the power dynamics of the wider political context. It highlights the need for policy makers to focus on the design of institutional mechanisms that allow for a more bottom-up approach to metropolitan planning through which to address common problems and define shared objectives.

Key Words: democratic decentralization • Kolkata • partisan politics • urban governance

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