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ABSTRACT
Since 2000 in New Delhi, urban decentralization has mainly come in the form of the highly visible Bhagidari or partnership scheme, inviting city residents to participate in a "process of dialogue and the discovery of joint-solutions." 1 This paper critically examines this program between 2000 and 2012, through the experiences of primarily middle-class neighbourhood organizations called Resident Welfare Associations, or RWAs that were included in the scheme. The paper argues that rather than constitutional decentralization, Bhagidari as an initiative must be read in terms of a larger shiftto entrepreneurial governance. Bhagidari's success has been in delegating management to RWAs, at little cost to city government, while seemingly opening up a "participatory" space for middle-class urban residents in civic affairs. However, for RWAs the article argues that Bhagidari's impact has come to represent an attempt at harnessing and managing the new middle-class aspiration to engage with urban government for administrative and political ends. In this context, Bhagidari has also been seen as an important means of cultivating middle-class consent and a constituency through courting RWAs for an ambitious chief executive. Over time, this has become a common strategy for building political and civic visibility for a range of actors, one reason why the number of RWAs has proliferated.
Keywords: Delhi, urban decentralization, Bhagidari, governance, politics.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5509/2013864813
Introduction
The push to decentralize governance in India came in the 1990s and was cotemporaneous with the opening of the economy to global capital flows. The putative rationale for decentralization was to strengthen lower levels of government, both rural and urban, and to ensure better service delivery by encouraging citizens' participation in governance. In this context, this article critically examines urban decentralization in Delhi, India, with a focus on the Bhagidari or partnership/stakeholder scheme, which was put into effect by the Delhi state government in 2000, aiming to involve city residents in a "process of dialogue and discovery of joint-solutions"2 to existing civic problems.
This paper investigates the program's workings between 2000 and 2012, when it received a great deal of attention in Delhi's civic politics as a new form of urban governance, especially for the city's middle classes. The Bhagidari program's emphasis, as many have noted,3 was primarily on including middle-class Resident Welfare Associations (or RWAs)...