Эксперт: Индия должна перейти от управления «Великим Кумбхом» к решению повседневных проблем горожан

India has become remarkably good at being an event manager. Give the State a fixed date, a large crowd, political attention and a mandate that cannot fail, and it can mobilise an extraordinary administrative machine. The Maha Kumbh, elections, major summits and the vaccination drive demonstrate that capacity. Yet ask the same local machinery to keep a city drained through the monsoon, its roads intact, its garbage collected and its public transport reliable through the year, and competence suddenly becomes much harder to find. It raises an awkward question: if the State can prepare a temporary city for millions, why must a permanent city wait for the monsoon to discover that its drains need cleaning? Citizens do not live inside events. They live in the days between them. Their experience of government is shaped by whether the garbage was collected this morning, whether the road survived the rains yesterday, whether the footpath is usable - if it is present at all - and whether a government office responds without requiring a phone call to someone influential. The Extraordinary Versus the Everyday The extraordinary tells us what the State can do. The mundane tells us what it chooses to do consistently. Every time Mumbai, New Delhi, Gurugram or Bengaluru floods, the script is familiar. Politicians blame extraordinary rainfall, nature or the rain gods. Bureaucrats cite clogged drains, encroachments, construction or inadequate capacity. Agencies pass responsibility between one another. Citizens watch roads become rivers, traffic collapse and neighbourhoods go under water, before the machinery eventually mobilises to deal with the consequences. Once the water recedes, institutional memory often appears to recede with it. This is the distinction between crisis management and continuous governance. A crisis concentrates authority. An event has a deadline. A VIP visit creates urgency. A global summit creates political ownership. A pandemic creates an imperative that cannot be deferred. Routine public administration has no such drama. The drain must be cleaned next year as well. The road must remain usable after it is repaired. When Crisis Creates Capacity This creates a bias towards response over prevention. We mobilise impressively when failure becomes impossible to hide, but invest insufficiently in ensuring that predictable failure never occurs. The monsoon is treated as a recurring emergency despite arriving with extraordinary regularity. Covid demonstrated the other side of this equation. The scale of vaccination, logistics and emergency healthcare mobilisation showed that when the State decides something matters urgently, administrative barriers can be overcome. That makes the persistence of ordinary dysfunction harder to explain away. Why can a city mobilise to vaccinate millions but not prevent potholes or provide consistently better public healthcare? Why can agencies coordinate for a global summit but not coordinate the drainage system residents depend upon every monsoon? The issue, therefore, is not simply whether India has capacity. It is whether that capacity can be institutionalised and applied continuously. The Politics of What Shows There is a political economy behind this. New infrastructure is visible and inauguratable. Maintenance is neither glamorous nor easily attributable. A new bridge has a plaque. A road has a ribbon-cutting ceremony. A functioning drainage system has nothing to display because its greatest success is an event that never happened. The incentives follow. An officer who successfully manages a high-profile event is visible to political leadership. An officer who quietly prevents years of municipal failures may leave behind no dramatic evidence of achievement. Politics rewards what can be claimed. Bureaucracy responds to what is measured. Citizens live with what neither finds sufficiently visible. The consequence is far larger than inconvenience. It is a diminished quality of life. A city does not become liveable because it can host one extraordinary event successfully. It becomes liveable when its roads, drainage, public transport, sanitation, air quality, public spaces and basic services work predictably. The Invisible Tax of Dysfunction When these systems do not work, citizens spend more money, more time and more energy compensating for failures that should never have occurred. This is an invisible tax on the economy. Flooded roads cost working hours. Potholes damage vehicles. Unreliable public transport reduces productivity. Poor sanitation creates health costs. Traffic consumes time that could otherwise be spent earning, studying or with family. Businesses build private workarounds for unreliable infrastructure. The cumulative result is that people live lives that are materially harder, more expensive and more stressful than they need to be. The inequality is particularly corrosive. Those who can afford to escape public failure do so. They buy private healthcare, private education, private transport, backup power, water tankers and gated environments. The affluent can purchase resilience. The ordinary citizen has to negotiate failure. A city that is extraordinarily expensive yet routinely difficult to live in also imposes a tax on aspiration. Many young Indians who possess the education, skills or financial means to seek opportunities abroad are attracted not merely by higher salaries but by predictability. A country that celebrates its demographic dividend should ask why so many of its most mobile young people imagine their better future elsewhere. The Sovereign’s Everyday Promise This brings us to the more fundamental question: what does the sovereign owe its citizens? Citizens obey laws, pay taxes, surrender certain freedoms and accept the State’s legitimate authority because there is an implicit reciprocity. The State promises security, order, justice, public goods and the institutional conditions to live with dignity. The Constitution gives this relationship legal and moral substance. Governance gives it everyday meaning. When citizens pay taxes but must purchase private substitutes for basic public services, obey regulations that are weakly enforced against others and repeatedly fend for themselves against preventable failures, that bargain begins to feel one-sided. The citizen is expected to comply continuously while the State delivers selectively. That has consequences for democratic legitimacy. A citizen who sees institutions functioning predictably develops trust in them. A citizen who encounters arbitrary enforcement, broken services and political buck-passing learns that outcomes depend on influence, money, persistence or luck. From Heroic Administration to Everyday State Capacity This is why the answer cannot be another heroic administrator. India has capable civil servants, engineers, doctors, police officers, municipal workers and other public servants. Elections, crises, vaccination and major national events have repeatedly demonstrated that. What is missing is an institutional architecture that makes competent performance routine rather than dependent on exceptional individuals. India should be proud that it can manage the extraordinary. The Kumbh, vaccination and the conduct of elections demonstrate something important: when the State decides that something matters, it can make the machinery move. The true test of state capacity is not whether India can perform magnificently when millions are watching. It is whether it can keep a drain clear, a road usable, a city clean, a hospital functioning and a public service reliable when nobody is watching. Viksit Bharat is the national ambition. But for the citizen negotiating a flooded road, a pothole or an uncollected pile of garbage, the more immediate demand is Fix-It Bharat. A republic should not reserve its best capacity for moments that make headlines. Its citizens deserve it on an ordinary day. (Srinath Sridharan is Author, Policy Researcher & Corporate Advisor, Twitter: @ssmumbai.) Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication. Discover the latest Business News, Sensex, and Nifty updates. Obtain Personal Finance insights, tax queries, and expert opinions on Moneycontrol or download the Moneycontrol App to stay updated! Find the best of Al News in one place, specially curated for you every weekend. 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