The past few weeks saw the verdict of Supreme Court on conducting the local bodies elections implemented all across the country. With the exception of Balochistan where these elections were held two years ago, there was a gripping election fever observed in Punjab, Sindh and KPK. While the results of local elections, trends, expected and unexpected outcomes remained a juicy topic of debate among the news channels and columns of the print media, more crucial questions related to local governments need to be answered by various stakeholders.

Delegation of administrative and financial powers to local bodies, capacity of elected local cadres to discharge the assigned responsibilities, tutelage and fiction with the upper tiers of government, conflict and contestation of development agenda between various tiers of government and the capacities of permanent staff of municipalities to stand up to emerging roles are vital mentions.

It goes without saying that before the conduct of local elections, provincial governments have taken several measures to ring fence their powers and prerogatives in various sectors of performance. Many of these steps were taken to entirely reduce the role of incoming local governments in terms of service delivery. For example, sanitation and solid waste management have been traditional responsibility of local bodies.

In Sindh, the provincial government has constituted a ‘Sindh Solid Waste Management Board’ through an Act of provincial legislature. According to the Act, a provincially constituted board -- comprising bureaucrats and other chosen individuals -- has been authorised to deal with solid waste management tasks in cities and towns of the province. Completely bypassing the fact that municipalities possess regular sanitary staff and supervising management personnel, the board intends to manage solid waste management services through private contractors.

Despite its creation in 2013, the board has been entirely unsuccessful in showing any performance. Heaps of garbage in the major neighbourhoods, reckless spot damping along the nullahs and culverts, infinite delays in lifting garbage from main arteries and inability to create any complaint redressal mechanism of any sort are the indicators of inaction of this board.

The Punjab government has been on the spree of creating costly service companies through public subsidies. Without taking the existing staff of municipalities on board, it is found that urban waste management companies are being created in Lahore and other cities. These companies seem to show a high visibility through print and electronic media, events, moots, street signage and other forms of promotion. The citizens are made to believe that this ‘most modern’ format of service delivery is sustainable and cost effective.

The companies are using a combination of contracting as well as providing service through their own staff. Whereas there is no denying the fact that waste management is a vital service, its provision is the legally mandated task of the municipalities. By creating supra provincial bodies, the provincial governments are only acting in a politely motivated manner. The citizens must be informed about the mechanism of cost recovery and overall management of these subsidies that have already run into billions of rupees. The elected local governments shall face tenacious resistance from upper tiers to win back this assigned function to their log books.

It will be in the interest of provincial and local governments to streamline roles, responsibilities and allocation of revenue in respect to essential services to ensure a smooth transaction of powers as well as ensuring a cordial working environment.

There are serious issues in respect to capacity of municipal staff to shoulder administrative and service delivery responsibilities. If one examines the level of association of common folks with local councillors and other representatives, it constitutes the baseline of political interactions. Besides, people need an efficient service delivery mechanism and complaint redressal system for routines such as attestation, verification and certification of various kinds. Local institutions and their elected members are normally forthcoming in such tasks. Small scale development schemes, maintenance and repair projects are also important works that require immediate attention. If the decision-making apparatus is centralised in Karachi and in the person of chief minister, very little progress can be expected. Expectation from bureaucrats alone to be sympathetic to the local issues may not be very realistic.

A well-functioning local government system in urban and rural domains has to be strengthened after removing the various handicaps that it has faced. Problems identified during the past eight years include poor quality of human resource, paucity of operational budgets, weak mechanism of monitoring, absence of effective audit and accounts procedures, financial dependence on the provincial /federal government, lack of control over police force, tutelage exercised by federal/provincial institutions and inability to generate development finance for local works. One finds more developed cities like Karachi struggling with shortage of funds to strengthen vital services such as water supply. Many other contexts are even worse in service delivery outreaches.

The regime may evolve a fresh strategy by using elected local governments to serve their manifestoes. In many cities including Karachi and Hyderabad, there have been allegations that excess staff was hired which has overburdened the already fragile financial position of municipalities. Many of these staff members have been found as non-existing or ghost staff.

An emergent task before the local authorities shall be to streamline staffing and bring discipline in hiring practices. Capacity-building in the local service delivery; notification of bodies such as public safety commissions, citizen community boards or finance commissions; development of municipal services as specialised cadres; launch of appropriate taxes to generate local revenue and the acceleration of mass contact to stretch the outreach of this tier are some basic steps. There are many institutional arms, think tanks and nongovernmental organisations that have garnered enough experience to transform the political objectives into a proper workable blueprint for the future form of local government.

In the spirit of democracy and fair play, any such blueprint should be debated threadbare with each stakeholder, party and group that matter in Sindh. The new local government should bring peace and harmony to the province, not generate further schisms in the already divided ranks in the society.