Background
India, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, owes much of its recent development to rapid urbanization. Cities now contribute 60% of the nation’s GDP, with urban populations skyrocketing from 109 million in 1970 to estimated 460 million in 2018. As India transitions from being a largely rural to an urban society, the focus needs to be strengthening the local governance specially urban local bodies to keep up with the growing demands and make this whole growth process a sustainable one. Experience over the course of implementation different urban development schemes in last two decades, appear to indicate a static capacity to take up projects and augment service delivery. In all fairness, each of these programmes attempted to augment capacities of municipal bodies through the course of availability of capital, development of infrastructure and scheme specific reforms. However, to address the challenges confronting Indian cities, there is an urgent need to focus on the capacity building of municipal bodies with a bottom-up approach where focus should be on improving the institutional, organizational and individual competencies required to effectively deliver roles and responsibility of each designation, function and department, aligned to overall development vision or objective of the city.
Govt of India have launched “Mission Karmayogi” to create a competent civil service rooted in Indian ethos, with a shared understanding of Indias priorities. A nodal agency from government of India has been given responsibility to transform the capacity and performance of government employees through driving standardization and harmonization of capacity building efforts across the Indian civil services landscape. Under the mission agency sought our help in developing strategies, action plans and implementation framework for capacity building of Urban Local Bodies.
Our Approach:-
With a goal to institutionalize Urban Capacity Building at scale of across all 3 tiers of governance, Primus Partners devised 5 pillar approach for strengthening the capacity building ecosystem for urban local bodies:-
- Move Urban Capacity Building from supply-driven to demand-driven approach by ULBs
- Linking Job-Roles to Performance and Continuous Improvement
- Strengthen the Urban Training (supply) ecosystem in India with world-class pedagogy and faculty
- Higher integration of Technology in Urban Capacity Building ecosystem for Access, Quity and Quality of Skilling
- Move ULBs from inputs based to Citizen Oriented / Service Oriented Governance
Benefits
- The key agencies involved in urban development or managing urban local bodies build consensus over proposed capacity building agenda.
- Development of a common framework of understanding for municipal capacities across different levels of functionaries.
- Capacity Building treated as mainframe function in Urban Local Bodies.
- Strengthened supply side i.e. access and availability of adequate resources for delivery of trainings as per the need of ULBs
- Improved delivery of citizen services and infrastructureImproved municipal performance indices across the pilot states of current phase
