After the Swacch Bharat Mission (SBM) was launched by the Government of India (GoI) in 2014, the Indore Municipal Corporation (IMC) achieved remarkable success in promoting sanitation in Indore. This case study analyses the IMC’s success, focussing on the underlying public management processes and the conditions in which these positive management practices emerged.
The IMC succeeded in door-to-door garbage collection including separation of garbage by citizens for processing, removal of stray animals from public spaces, keeping roads and other public sites clean, waste processing and other activities. Its success in improving the drainage system was more limited. The IMC’s success was enabled by effective public management practices, i.e., protecting sanitation from corruption and clientelism to a significant degree, effective leadership that motivated the team, rigorous but supportive supervision, attention to workers’ welfare, collaboration with NGOs and private firms, meticulous planning , reformulation of strategies as per feedback, constant improvement of processes, eliciting citizens’ co-operation and responding to their needs, while enforcing laws and rules strictly and acquiring appropriate infrastructure. These productive practices spread to many other IMC activities as well, such as enhancing revenues, and the IMC became a more effective organisation.
The above-mentioned public management practices are not the norm in India and emerged in a very specific context in the IMC. To sustain the IMC’s gains and for positive practices to spread, key aspects of this context must be recreated, and the lacunae that remain addressed. The IMC got strong political support, which ensured that capable municipal commissioners were appointed and supported when they took on vested interests, which is not the norm. Sanitation was protected from corruption, though corruption was not weeded out from other activities of the IMC and is a powerful dynamic in the wider system. As a municipal corporation, the IMC had a degree of autonomy to take decisions, which allowed it to experiment with various strategies and learn. However, most government initiatives are implemented through departmental agencies without such autonomy and the IMC itself has little autonomy regarding personnel and depends substantially on state government grants. The IMC enhanced its organisational capacity by following productive public management practices, but it lacks expertise in several key areas of urban governance. This reduces its capacity to tackle more complex issues, as was visible in its limited success in improving the drainage system.
The case study illustrates the need for a broad-based shift in the context in which public organisations function.
