Pune was once the political and ideological capital of the entire Indian Subcontinent. Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj sowed the seeds of not only freedom but also of people-centric governance.

Later, the swords of the Marathas offered protection to the throne of the Delhi Sultanate, and the Peshwas rode out to defend India’s borders against foreign aggression. Finally, the Maratha Empire was the last holdout against the British.
Kranti Jyoti Savitribai Phule and Mahatma Phule did their world-class work right here in Pune. The Indian Independence Movement was led by Punekars like Lokmanya Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Mahatma Gandhi called Pune the hive of activists, and countless freedom fighters were imprisoned here for long spells.

After independence, our MP, N V Gadgil was a member of the Constituent Assembly with Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, and later, a union minister (holding the portfolios of Public Works, and Mines & Power) in the first central cabinet of independent India with Jawaharlal Nehru as PM. He later served as the Governor of Punjab. Subsequently, MPs from Pune have played large and responsible roles and affected policy and governance at national levels. S M Joshi was a well-known socialist who worked for the Dalits and oppressed and was one of the leading lights of the Samyukt Maharashtra movement.

Mohan Dharia was a minister in the fifth and sixth Lok Sabhas and was later Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. V N Gadgil was the Union Minister of Information and Broadcasting during the Rajiv Gandhi era. Suresh Kalmadi was a pioneer in Indian sports, serving as the 9th President of the Indian Olympic Association and was instrumental in putting Pune on the global sports map.

But the same Pune has not had a leader of national repute or reach for over a decade and a half. My city has been without a Member of Parliament for most of 2023, and for a year before that, the Hon MP was unable to have much impact due to ill health. Worse, there have been no local representatives since April 2022, when the last Municipal Corporation ended. We have now gone 20 months without local elections! This is an unprecedented situation.

World-class cities are not possible without visionary leadership – and here we have had absolutely no leadership at all. And when the city is not a state or national capital, things very rarely happen ‘naturally’ or ‘automatically’. They have to be researched, planned, designed, and then executed with the discipline and passion of an Olympic relay race team. And for this, they have to be led by lions. With vision, courage, and heart. Unfortunately, despite the fact that we were the cradle of leadership once, producing one lion after another in service of the nation, we are severely lacking today in this regard.

Good leadership also means thinking about and working on issues that people do not generally care about in the short term but have long-term consequences. For example – groundwater table, climate change, global warming, scientific research, infrastructure, etc. These are usually issues that do not bother voters in the short-to-medium terms but, if unaddressed, come back to haunt us all. And by then, usually, it is too late. This is, therefore, the real job of leaders – to make decisions for the overall good of society in the long term instead of only acting like a fire brigade and dousing small fires every day while ignoring the coming apocalypse.

In our country, every aspiration of my city and its citizens, every dream, every fear, and every expectation is subject to a single gatekeeper: the gargantuan and complex bureaucracy, which is the core of the ‘system’.

We keep talking about all the end results we want (output) and the monetary resources it will take (input), but we hardly ever talk about the machinery that will actually do the work. What we need is massive administrative reform. We aspire to apply the latest research from the fields of behavioural sciences, psychology, and neuroscience in the private sector, but never for government employees. So they still work under systems that are stuck in the agricultural and early industrial eras.

How can we expect to live in a 21st-century Pune when approximately 30,000 (22,000 PMC, 7,000 Police, and others) government employees are still working with a 19th-century mindset? Once in a while, an honest and dynamic IAS/IPS officer gathers public appreciation through his work. Sometimes, it is more PR and media management than work. But once this person is transferred, things go back to square one. People think that ‘if only there were more officers like him, all would be well.’ This is a fallacy. In fact, this is the well-known ‘Good Officer Syndrome’.

The truth is that we need systems that will largely work well no matter who is in charge. It is established behavioural and organisational science that if you put good people in bad systems, you get bad output, but even if you put bad people in good systems, you still get largely a good output. To repeat, we need massive administrative reform. We demand that the government implement proven innovative ideas like Kam Sudhar Mandals (Work Improvement Committees) to bridge the gap of status and self-esteem between junior and senior bureaucratic employees. Such committees are a concept based on the Indian joint family system, as also in quality circles and Kaizen of Japan, where everybody from class 4 employees to the senior-most officers regularly come together to discuss, brainstorm problems, exchange views, make suggestions, and finally come up with solutions.

Collective ownership, i.e. everybody’s involvement in decision-making, leads to much higher and more efficient levels of implementation. These committees also focus on the personal and professional growth of every employee, which fosters ownership and innovation. These are globally proven ideas that we must implement urgently.

One definition of insanity is to do the same thing again and again but expect different results. Our government’s way of functioning has hardly changed in the last few decades.

Yes, laptops and websites have replaced physical files in some cases, yet the underlying goals, processes, systems, and style of functioning haven’t changed at all. Most importantly, the mentality and approach has remained stuck in the last century, if not earlier. Every developed country owes its progress to innovation.

Every successful business and even individual owe their achievements to the ability to constantly reinvent themselves and come up with new answers to old problems. The world has changed drastically since independence, and much of it has happened in the last 3 decades, since liberalisation. But this revolution has left our government systems largely untouched. This is not just due to the inherent status quo-ist nature of bureaucracy, but also because of our inherent beliefs that innovation is something that only people at the top of the hierarchy can do – whether caste, class, or position-wise. So, when a junior employee does something innovative, it is called ‘Jugaad’ and never given the respect his work deserves.

If we have to truly innovate, we have to accept the fact that innovations can be and should be done by anybody irrespective of their position in society. And in fact, innovations are most effective when done on the frontline of the work, and not in air-conditioned central offices which are far removed from the ground realities. We have quoted a number of international best practices in this document. Now, some people may think that cities from developed nations cannot be compared to us as – among other things – they have a lower population.

First of all, many of these international cities have a population density that is higher than Pune. But more importantly, when we wish to fly, do we look up and aspire to be among the stars, or do we look down at the ground and rejoice that at least we are above it?. We, the people of Pune must be ambitious and aspirational in our dreams.

Our history deserves it, we deserve it and most importantly, our coming generations deserve it.

While visionary political and bureaucratic leadership is important, and bureaucratic reforms are much needed, it is even more important to have every citizen of the city interested and invested in the affairs of the city. It has now been established across the world that unless all stakeholders (employees, students, women, seniors, labourers, bureaucracy, citizens, amongst others) are involved wholeheartedly, there can be no real progress.

For too long, we have looked at the government merely as a ‘service provider’, similar to private providers of internet connections, food delivery, or hotel services. We cannot say that our work is done once TDS is deducted, and we have voted every few years. We need to be far more involved in the city’s and our society’s decision-making process. Because in a democracy, active citizen involvement (not just the Civil Society, but all citizens) is the only real check on the bureaucracy and politicians. It is the only way to fight corruption and increase the government’s productivity and efficiency.

My aim behind this report is to get every single citizen of Pune involved (in their own small way) in steering the collective destiny of this city. The world-renowned and proven Mohalla Committee concept that was pioneered by a Punekar is something that needs to be implemented in the city immediately through which the Civil Society and, indeed, every citizen will act as a check on the administration.

Mohalla Committee is where citizens from all socio-economic strata, from labourers to CEOs, every gender and caste, from all political ideologies, belonging to a particular area (galli/mohalla/lane/neighbourhood) meet periodically with local representatives of government (police constable, Talathi, Tehsildar etc.) to discuss development, quality of life, local problems, disputes etc.

This fosters a real sense of community and acts as a check on the administration, incentivising and inspiring them to work in far more effective ways. From resolving all petty, non-cognizable civil matters without going to the judiciary and clogging the courts, to preventing communal riots and local crime by quashing rumours and creating trust, to getting immediate civic issues sorted through direct interaction between residents and administrators, the Mohalla Committee brings transparency, accountability, responsibility, and answerability to the system.

This is a proven Made-in-India model invented and implemented (with tremendous success at the most trying of times, like the Mumbai riots in 1992 in the most sensitive of areas like Bhiwandi) by an assal Punekar (IPS Khopade Retd) that has the potential to transform this city and create a model for other cities to follow.

Along with the relationship of citizens with the government, we also need to work on the relationship of citizens amongst themselves. Pune has now devolved into many different Punes.

Humans will always tend towards tribalism, but the overwhelming stress of living in this city is driving us further into our shells and ghettos.

To begin with, 40% of citizens of Pune live in slums. They are largely ignored by the mainstream and only a transactional relationship (maid, driver, delivery person, etc.) exists between them and the non-slum-dwellers.

Then, there is the aloofness, even insensitivity, that comes from the remoteness of location, given the rapidly increasing geographical size of Pune. The people living in Magarpatta, for example, are not really worried about what happens to the city’s rivers – that is seen as a problem of those living along the river banks. The people in Viman Nagar do not care about what happens to the Vetal Tekdi – that is seen as a problem of the people living in Pune 04. And the people living there do not care whether the bus services from Hadapsar or Katraj are adequate or the Wagholi flyover is made and so on. One part of the city is completely divorced from the problems of the other. Apart from this, the usual divides of religion, language, caste, and regionalism also act as powerful divisive forces.

This is not the fault of the citizens per se. Nobody has articulated a unifying identity, character, or vision of the city in more than a decade and half, and hence, there is no collective ownership of the city.

None of the above is possible without first creating a vision for the city. How will we start the journey without knowing at least a rough destination? Every company of repute, and in fact every high-achieving individual has some form of a statement of long-term intent, which then leads to a road map, and finally to execution. Why can’t cities have one? I’m not talking about the ‘Vision Statement’ of the municipal corporation or the state government.

I am talking about a collective vision that the people of a city come up with and hold dearly and feel invested in. How will the city plan for the population increase due to births and migration (40% per decade so far!) over the next decade? How is the city going to deal with AI, automation, climate change, and the consequent mass migration, job redistribution, reeducation, and the resultant pressures on infrastructure, environment, health, and housing in the near future? How can we prepare ourselves better to deal with what the next 50 years hold for Pune? How can we be better ancestors for future generations just like we aspire to be better descendants of this city with its glorious history and past generations of super-achievers? Apart from dealing with all the future problems and challenges, what are the positive dreams, aspirations and expectations of Punekars?

How should we channel our collective energies and efforts towards this? What should we prioritise? And what should we relegate for later? What do we state and project as our intent? What do we build the road map to the future of this city with, and where do we build it to? Coming up with a vision for a city is not just a technical exercise.

It must be guided using sound scientific and rational principles. And unless the vision comes out of the very core of the cultural DNA of that person, organisation or city, it will only remain a fancy statement on paper. In my internationally acclaimed talk at TEDx Pune on how to reimagine our cities, I spoke about turning Pune into the city of innovation – where every citizen strives to find new solutions to old problems in every aspect of personal, professional, and public life. Where everybody, whether a student, trader, techie, government worker, driver, or pedestrian, will embrace innovation as a way of life!

I have outlined how Pune can become the innovation hub of the world, with companies setting up their R&D centres in our city. The first step towards becoming a city of innovation would be to become a city of continuous education, where every citizen even after college will continue to learn new things and skills by doing and sharing. So we need to become the city of continuous learning.

This could be the game changer we have been waiting for. It is something that will galvanise the entire population, give something to rally around and give a positive direction for everybody to work towards.