The recent kerfuffle in the Madurai Central constituency, as part of campaign rhetoric for the Assembly election in Tamil Nadu, perfectly encapsulated the structural rot in our democracy. The opposition candidate claimed that Madurai has woeful civic administration, is dirty, and lacks the infrastructure that such a historic city ought to have; and blamed the incumbent MLA, who also happens to be a Minister, of neglecting the constituency’s civic upkeep. It is not just the challenger in this constituency; almost every middle-class conversation across the country echoes some version of this anger given how dystopian Indian cities are. And they all seek to blame their MLA or MP.

A common question that one comes across is “what has this MLA/MP done for the constituency?”

The short answer often is this: an MLA is not supposed to “do” something; she is supposed to represent the will of the people in the legislative body. But that answer disappoints people looking for tangible answers. So, let us first look at what an MLA is actually supposed to do; and then look at what she should not do.

The powers and duties of an MLA are strictly legislative and oversight-driven. They are our representatives who draft, debate, and pass the laws on our behalf that govern a State. In India, most States are bigger than the most populous European countries. So, this is a heavy burden. They make laws on everything from labour regulations and industrial policy to State education frameworks and police forces.

Equally critical is their financial control, functioning as the ultimate check on the State’s purse. The Executive branch, primarily the Chief Minister and the Cabinet, cannot spend a single rupee without the Assembly’s permission. The MLA’s core job is to ruthlessly dissect the State budget, question departmental allocations, and vote on the Finance Bill. Furthermore, they act as the primary mechanism for executive accountability through the Question Hour, the Zero Hour, and legislative committees. The MLA is supposed to audit the Executive, forcing the bureaucracy and the Cabinet to explain their actions, failures, and expenditures to the public.

No direct executive authority

And, as a corollary, the MLA has absolutely zero direct executive authority. They cannot issue a tender, they cannot order a road to be paved, and they cannot direct a sanitary worker to clear a blocked drain. More importantly, they should not do any of these in a federated structure of government.

The anger about the elected MLA not “doing something” stems from middle-class exceptionalism and rests on a foundation of constitutional illiteracy. In a liberal democracy, the first principle is that we avoid concentrating powers in the hands of one individual, even if the cost of that is poor efficiency or outcome. Over and above that, in a federated structure like India, we have multiple layers of governments which are all governments in their own right and do not answer to one another. The risk of tyranny is what we seek to mitigate by this careful design.

If the people who write the laws are also the ones who execute them and spend the money, the result is inevitably tyranny and corruption. The Executive is designed for action. Its mandate is to collect taxes, build infrastructure, and maintain law and order. The legislature, conversely, is designed for restraint. It exists to authorise those taxes, approve the infrastructure budget, and monitor the police to ensure power is not abused.

When voters demand that an MLA physically fix a local road, they are asking the auditor to become the contractor. When an MLA becomes a patron who distributes State resources to his constituency, he completely abandons his role as an auditor. A legislator who relies on the Chief Minister’s favour to get a bridge built in his constituency will never ask difficult questions about the Chief Minister’s fiscal deficit. When the legislature is neutered thus, the executive becomes an absolute monarchy. In such a system, the MLA is akin to a local chieftain who pays tribute to an emperor in the guise of a Chief Minister. We built our systems of government—with checks and balances—to avoid exactly that.

Voting for such an MLA based on whether they have fixed local civic issues is a symptom of a diseased federal structure, but, more dangerously, rewarding this behaviour actively deepens the rot. When we re-elect an MLA because she used her influence or Local Area Development funds to patch a road, we create a perverse political incentive. The MLA now has a vested interest in keeping the local municipality weak, underfunded, and subservient. If an empowered Mayor is able to fix the road independently, the MLA would lose her patronage network and her political relevance on the ground. By treating the legislator as a local fixer, the voter unwittingly ensures that local government remains permanently powerless, guaranteeing that our cities will remain dystopian.

Panchayati Raj system

The 73rd and 74th Amendments to the Constitution, passed in 1992, mandated the creation of a third tier of government: the Panchayats and the Municipalities. According to the principle of subsidiarity, local civic issues should be handled entirely by locally elected Mayors and Councillors, funded by local property taxes and assured state grants. But State governments across all parties, across all States, have ruthlessly sabotaged these amendments. Rather than empowering cities, States have created parallel bureaucracies to usurp the powers that rightfully belong to the third tier.

Consider the existence of a State-level Ministry for Municipal Administration and Water Supply in Tamil Nadu. In a truly decentralised constitutional structure, such a department should be abolished. Its very presence is an institutional overreach, allowing the State capital to micromanage civic administration. A glaring example is the construction of stormwater drains in Chennai. This is a local, street-level engineering challenge that should inherently be planned, funded, and executed by the Greater Chennai Corporation. Instead, it is commandeered by Fort St George, turning a basic municipal duty into a multi-crore State-level political spectacle, while the corporation is reduced to a glorified clerical office.

The solution to India’s urban collapse is not to demand more from our MLAs, but to demand the radical devolution of funds, functions, and functionaries to local governments. There is a profound hypocrisy in the political discourse of high-performing States. Industrialised States in the South rightfully champion federalism, fiercely resisting the Union government’s centralisation of tax revenues and arguing that governance should be tailored to local demographic and economic realities. Yet, these very same State capitals act as imperial, centralising forces towards their own cities.

The fundamental decentralisation argument—the core of the federalism debate—cannot stop at State borders. If true subsidiarity is the goal, most everyday governance must happen at the local level. Municipalities must be granted robust, constitutionally protected taxing powers, rather than forcing them to survive on the intermittent charity of the Chief Minister.

As Tamil Nadu prepares to vote, the electorate must recalibrate its demands. If you want a liveable city, demand an empowered Mayor, an independent corporation, and the abolition of State ministries that hijack municipal authority. But when you vote for an MLA, you are electing a lawmaker to police the State’s purse and hold the executive accountable. We must stop electing legislators and expect them to act as municipal contractors. Until we do that, our cities will continue to sink, and our Assemblies will remain rubber stamps.

R.S. Nilakantan is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide.

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