Who Is In Charge of the City? In Memory of K.C. Sivaramakrishnan

Governing metropolitan cities has been and continues to be a problematic undertaking in much of the world, India being no exception. In his lifelong engagement with the urban sector, K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, in whose memory this article is written, explored the complexities of metropolitan cities, their make-up and composition, and the heterogeneity of ways in which they were governed, and concluded that the fundamental question of bringing the large number of municipalities, parastatals and functional units under one composite management structure has remained elusive. Attributing it, at least in the case of India, to the fear of the aggregation of power at the level of a city, he considered it incomprehensible that India, which is at the cusp of rapid growth of metropolitan cities, would opt for sub-optimal management structures, absorbing the huge costs that such structures entail for its economy.