- access to credit

-income generation

-job creation

- safe water provision

-transportation and mobility

-waste-management and treatment

- institutional reform

-partnership development

-public administration and management

-resource mobilization

Level of Activity: City/Town

Ecosystem: Arid/Semi-Arid

Challenge :

The opening up city-life to all so that the citizens as users of services and owners of shelter and workplace and much more, can fully participate is, for most people, a wholly new way to work, to live, and is not without resistance.

The role of cities the world over has changed as a result of the major forces of globalisation of national economies, increased demand to match participatory democracy with existing representative democracies, spread of new technologies of cyberpace, and changing relationships between the State and the Capital. The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) took these changes as a challenge and found that the best way to address them was by building innovative - formal or informal, financial or voluntary, technical or professional, consultative or collaborative, community level or policy level - partnerships at a wide range of local governance functions, especially those that include:

(1) Poverty eradication, including those of the poor women in Ahmedabad;

(2) Infrastructure provision,including physical and social, at community level on cost-sharing and service selection basis; and

(3) Improved urban governance by mobilising resources from the private local or global sources, or rating performance of services through Report Card method, or bringing in a cadre of professional city managers at middle-level management or appointing programme cycle management agencies.

The purpose of these innovative partnerships has been to create a new role for the city where a range of stakeholders, especially the poor and weak among them, have a direct and positive role to play in improving the city life.

Citywide Trust :

Trust is hardly discussed as an urban governance issue. But partnerships are built on trust. The city was low on this count. The first step taken to regain trust was to manage municipal money well : increase collection and decrease deficit. The second step was to demonstrate that the work on hand at AMC was taken seriously: rating performance, bringing in professional management, and comparing efforts. The third step was to demonstrate that the majority of the citizens, the poor, mattered in city management : investments in Participatory Slum Networking, Clean Ahmedabad Campaign, and Citizen Report Card on performance rating of services. Such steps regained the trust that Ahmedabad enjoyed over decades.

Context of Partnerships :

Urban partnerships are easy to recommend but hard to form. Market forces squeeze AMC so hard with global rates available to some of the partners for their time and resources; the management of workplace has changed so much due to the recommendations of the Pay Commission and Finance Commission; regulations of urban governance need to look beyond land-use and by-laws; investment laws are changed over the past five years; and labour laws have little meaning when more than half of the city labour is in the unprotected sector. However, on each of these partnerships someone stood up and said 'yes' to form the partnership.

The main achievements of the innovative partnerships include :

(1) first-in-Asia credit rating of the municipal finance of AMC and the issue of US$10,000,000 Municipal Bonds;

(2) launch of Slum Networking reaching out to 200 slums and 40,000 low-income families over the next 5 years on cost-sharing and work-sharing basis jointly by the Community, Corporate bodies, and City authority;

(3) employment generating (for the 2000 poor paper-picker women) and environment regenerating (in 70 localities) through Clean Ahmedabad Campaign in collaboration with Saundarya Paperpickers' Cooperative, Prarthana Construction Builders, Excel Industries, and the local residents;

(4) state-of-the-art first ever financially viable Chimanlal Girdhardas Road as a commercial hub of western Ahmedabad;

(5) self-financing rational and generic medical drug stores owned by a cooperative of health workers at the most busy municipal hospitals benefiting 1000 patients a day from the poorest strata of the city;

(6) first-ever performance rating of urban basic services by the poorest among the service users in the inadequately severed 12 wards; and

(7) launching of a series of self financing, city-wide, urban design projects of River Front Development, International Finance and Trade Centre, and the Regional Habitat Centre.