Analysing irregular in elections to urban local bodies in India (1994 - 2023)

Abstract

In the wake of massive urbanisation in India, the local governance of these urban areas are of utmost importance. However, India’s urban local governance is plagued by several issues which hamper the quality of its governance––one of them being the lack of timely elections to municipal corporations, which results in the absence of local representatives. Most of the other issues concerning municipal governance are extensively researched, but there is currently inadequate scholarship on delayed elections, and no comprehensive quantitative study which can highlight the magnitude of delays to municipal elections across India.

This study intends to fill that research gap, through a quantitative study of elections to all the 250 Municipal Corporations in India today. It sets out with the research questions: (a) How prevalent and extensive are delays in elections to municipal corporations in India? (b) What are the reasons for delays in these local elections and are any of these reasons common to the different corporations across India? (c) Are there any correlations between the characteristics of corporations and the irregularity in the conduct of their elections?

Chapter 1 discusses the nature of the problem of urban local governance in India through an extensive literature review, along with a discussion of the theory around delayed elections. Chapter 2 describes this quantitative study and the results obtained. Chapter 3 provides an analysis of the reasons for delays and concludes with some insights for the future.