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By:

Abhijit Mulye

21 August 2024 at 11:29:11 am

Politics, pragmatism behind Singhal’s move to Dharavi

Mumbai: The state government’s recent appointment of senior IAS officer Vijay Singhal as the Officer on Special Duty (OSD) for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project is more than a routine bureaucratic shuffle. While it signals a major administrative push to fast-track Asia’s largest slum rehabilitation, murmurs in the corridors of power suggest the move is equally a byproduct of political maneuvering at the highest levels of the state government. For the past few years, the critical Dharavi...

Politics, pragmatism behind Singhal’s move to Dharavi

Mumbai: The state government’s recent appointment of senior IAS officer Vijay Singhal as the Officer on Special Duty (OSD) for the Dharavi Redevelopment Project is more than a routine bureaucratic shuffle. While it signals a major administrative push to fast-track Asia’s largest slum rehabilitation, murmurs in the corridors of power suggest the move is equally a byproduct of political maneuvering at the highest levels of the state government. For the past few years, the critical Dharavi redevelopment project was headed by a promotee IAS officer as an additional charge, leading to a perceived lack of momentum. The post had been visibly vacant since the retirement of SVR Srinivas last year. By bringing in a seasoned, direct-recruit 1997-batch officer like Singhal, the state government is sending a clear-cut message that the Dharavi redevelopment is now a top-tier priority. According to a senior state administration official, bringing in an officer of Singhal’s caliber is a direct indication that the government is finally taking the project seriously. His proven track record of cutting through bureaucratic inertia made him the undisputed first choice to break the logistical paralysis that has historically plagued the slum’s redevelopment. Cross Fire However, Singhal’s sudden exit from his role as Vice Chairman and Managing Director of the City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO) is reportedly tinged with political crossfire between Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. Singhal is known to be closely aligned with Shinde, who also holds the Urban Development (UD) portfolio. Sources indicate that the transfer serves a dual political purpose – while the Deputy CM wanted an efficient officer closely aligned with him to helm a high-stakes, high-visibility initiative like Dharavi; CM Fadnavis had his own designs for CIDCO. He reportedly wanted an officer from his own inner circle stationed at CIDCO to oversee his pet project – the ambitious “Educity” in Navi Mumbai. To facilitate Fadnavis’ wish for a loyalist at CIDCO, Singhal had to be shunted out, effectively serving the interests of both political heavyweights. The irony of the political maneuver is that Singhal laid the very groundwork for the Educity project he is now leaving behind. Spanning 100 hectares (250 acres) in Karanjade near the new Navi Mumbai International Airport, Educity was envisioned to host India’s first integrated cluster of foreign universities. Under Singhal’s leadership, CIDCO bypassed traditional delays, rapidly completing 85% of the required land acquisition and securing Rs 890 crore for site-readiness and access road tenders. Dharavi Challenge Singhal now trades the master-planned expanses of Navi Mumbai for the hyper-dense, socio-politically volatile terrain of Dharavi. His mandate shifts drastically from courting global educational institutions to managing the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of residents and preserving an informal economy worth billions. His past experience makes him uniquely equipped for this granular urban challenge. As a former Additional Municipal Commissioner for Solid Waste Management in the BMC, he introduced operational efficiencies that slashed Mumbai’s daily solid waste volume by 2,000 tonnes in under three months. His early-career success in crisis management will be heavily tested as he manages the sanitary and structural complexities of displacing and rehousing a massive population. Ultimately, Singhal’s appointment is a strategic intersection of politics and governance. It resolves a high-level tug-of-war over CIDCO, while placing a proven, aggressive executor at the helm of Maharashtra’s most complex urban challenge.

Administrative Sabotage

West Bengal’s voter-roll clean-up has exposed a government that treats electoral integrity not as a civic duty but as a political inconvenience.

West Bengal
West Bengal

A democracy’s health can often be measured not by how loudly its leaders invoke the ballot, but by how scrupulously they guard the machinery behind it. In West Bengal, that machinery is now grinding audibly. The Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has become a stress test of the Mamata Banerjee government’s commitment to clean elections. The results so far are damning.


Consider the numbers. Of the 4,600 micro-observers appointed by the ECI to supervise hearings on claims and objections, 778 failed to even attend a mandatory training session in Kolkata on December 24. These were not party cadres or political appointees, but Group A and Group B central government employees, drawn deliberately from outside the state’s political ecosystem, though posted within it, to act as neutral sentinels. Their collective absence was so brazen that the Commission was forced to issue show-cause notices, threatening disciplinary action and even suspension. For an exercise as procedurally modest as voter verification, such defiance is extraordinary. However, this seems to be familiar in Mamata Banerjee’s West Bengal.


The hearings will determine the fate of some 32 lakh ‘unmapped’ voters, citizens whose names, or whose parents’ names, did not appear in the 2002 SIR list as well as thousands more flagged for logical inconsistencies. The process is pure housekeeping.


Discrepancies in spelling, age or parentage are expected to be resolved while voters who miss a hearing are to get another chance. All documents are uploaded digitally. If anything, the process bends over backwards to err on the side of inclusion.


Yet it is precisely this insistence on procedure that seems to have unsettled the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government. From the outset, the party has alleged that micro-observers were being ‘imported’ from other states, a claim swiftly rebutted by the Chief Electoral Officer.


More telling is the quiet resistance on the ground. Micro-observers are meant to sit at 11 tables in each of the state’s 294 Assembly constituencies, alongside Booth Level Officers, supervisors and Electoral Registration Officers, examining enumeration forms and correcting errors. Their unexplained absence threatens to slow or derail the process.


The exclusion of Booth Level Agents (BLAs) - party representatives - from the hearings has further sharpened the confrontation. The ECI insists this is to “avoid unnecessary chaos” and ensure transparency, since all documents are uploaded and nothing can be hidden. That logic is sound. BLAs, unlike BLOs, are partisan actors who were already involved in collecting documents. But for the ruling TMC, accustomed to embedding itself at every stage of the electoral pipeline, even a modest reduction in visibility can feel like disenfranchisement.


Mamata Banerjee has long styled herself as a ‘defender’ of democracy against an ‘overbearing’ Centre. The reality offers a sobering contrast. West Bengal’s recent electoral history, from the uncontested panchayat polls of 2018 to post-poll violence in 2021, has left scars that no amount of populist flourish can disguise. The SIR exercise was an opportunity to restore some confidence: to show that the state would cooperate fully with an independent constitutional authority, even when it was inconvenient. Instead, it has chosen obstruction.

 

The same government that rails against alleged voter suppression elsewhere now appears uncomfortable with the idea of voters being properly mapped, verified and documented at home. The same party that claims to speak for the marginalised balks at a process designed to ensure that genuine electors are accurately recorded. Transparency, it seems, is welcome only when it is ornamental. When a state government allows or encourages a culture in which officials feel emboldened to skip training, ignore orders and test the Commission’s patience, it sends a corrosive message about the nature of democracy in West Bengal.


Banerjee and her government are being asked to tidy its rolls. Instead, they are untidying their reputation by such unseemly defiance.

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