Planning from the Bottom Up: Democratic Decentralisation in Action

This research highlights the gap between the official rhetoric and the political reality of democratic decentralisation and bottom-up planning using an indepth study of the metropolitan planning process in Kolkata, India. The key question that I address here is: how do elected officials at different governmental levels, professional planners, and ordinary citizens interact in the process of metropolitan planning, and which players dominate the process? I focus on the dynamic interactions between planners and the operation of the political process that shapes this reality. The empirical material for this case study includes interviews with actors involved in the metropolitan planning process in Kolkata, documents in the form of study reports, master plans, minutes of meetings, and official memos produced by the planning agency and by other organisations and individuals involved with metropolitan planning in Kolkata. Archival data from local and national newspapers were also used to substantiate some of the information gathered from other sources. My analysis of the case illustrates the following: (1) there are differences in the real motives for the state to pursue decentralisation and what it claims to be behind its decentralisation policy; (2) the planning process is unlikely to be truly bottom-up if power is concentrated within any one political party; (3) external funding, either from international agencies or higher levels of government, has the potential to force change in the local and regional structures of decision making so that the voices of ordinary people can be included in public decision making; (4) for the effective implementation of bottom-up approaches to metropolitan planning the planning bureaucracy needs to be independent of the political class; (5) bottom-up planning requires that planning capacity be built from a grassroots level. This requires devolution of both responsibilities and means/resources to carry out those responsibilities to the lowest level of planning; (6) the politicisation of decision making along party lines limits planning from the bottom up. Political parties in Kolkata and West Bengal are hierarchical organisations where members are accountable mainly to those above them. Therefore they are unlikely to become advocates for multiple constituencies and effective agents of change for bottom-up planning processes.