Every year, early monsoon rains inundate several cities countrywide causing dozens of fatalities and inflicting enormous economic loss to citizens by way of uprooted trees, collapsing homes, damage of household furniture, consumer durables and electronic equipment. And given the clogged justice system and virtually dead torts (actionable civil wrongs) practice in India, it’s highly doubtful that citizens, who suffer damage and business loss because of flooded homes and offices, ever recover even a fraction of the loss.

This year has not been any different. Early July downpours in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Gurugram, Shimla and Guwahati inflicted heavy damage on these cities and either ruined and/or wiped out the savings of thousands of citizens. And every year, the response of state and municipal governments primarily responsible for civic flood management is either inevitable accident or Act of God. As brilliant public intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta demonstrates in his illuminating op-ed essay in the Indian Express (July 16), there is no culture of specific accountability, naming and shaming.

At risk of inviting ridicule and contempt, we venture to state that a root cause is failure of state and municipal governments to give teeth to the 74th Constitution Amendment Act, 1993, which directs them to devolve meaningful administrative and taxation powers upon ward-level committees. If as envisaged by this enlightened legislation, Swiss Canton style committees comprising property owners in every civic ward were devolved a substantial share of property taxes, each ward would transform into a well-administered and well-maintained unit. For the simple reason that well-planned and administered neat neighbourhoods would drive up property values. State governments and municipal corporations are unwilling to respect the mandate of this constitutional amendment. Nor is any evident pressure exerted upon them by the academy and punditry to do so.

A second cause of the continuous decline of India’s urban habitats is intimately connected with recruitment of state and municipal government employees. Curiously, the intelligentsia seems unaware that dominant elites and castes of rural India contribute two-fifths and four-fifths of legislators in Parliament in Delhi and state governments. Nor do they seem aware that a top priority of these legislators is to pack state government bureaucracies and utilities — transformed into high-wage islands — with under-qualified kith and kin equipped with weak education in neglected government schools and malleable state universities.

Unaware of the complexities of administering and managing diverse and densely populated urban habitats, rural innocents inserted into state government and municipal bureaucracies have transformed urban habitations into untidy rural landscapes. Therefore, ensuring recruitment of truly educated and technically well-qualified bureaucrats, engineers and technicians is the second mandatory requirement to halt the accelerating slide of India’s 274 cities and peri-urban habitations into chaos and decay.