India, Jan. 16 -- What should be the real priorities of the newly elected BMC Corporators?

In the polls for the long-awaited Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections, political debate took centre stage but beyond the slogans and realpolitik lies a more pressing question: what should be the true priorities of the corporators elected to govern the city?

To answer this, it is important to understand the scale and responsibility of the BMC, the country's richest civic body, and Mumbai's only democratically elected local authority. Under the BMC Act of 1888, the Corporation's mandate extends across three critical areas-civic engineering and management, public health, and public education. In the case of Mumbai, this scope extends f...