Anagha Speaks

In 2012, citizens of Pune will elect a panel of corporators who will become their official elected representatives in the Standing Committee of Pune Municipal Corporation. Currently, quoting directly from a friend's email, there are 144 electoral wards in Pune. So there will be 144 elected representatives! Citizens will recall that earlier to 2007, the electoral wards and the adminstrative wards were somewhat alignged in number. Hence each electoral ward was larger and each elected corporator represented about 50000 to 60000 citizens. Since 2007, this larger electoral ward was split two or sometimed three ways to create smaller electoral wards called as 'prabhags'. In these 'prabhags', each elected corporator represented about 10000 to 15000 citizens, making the corporator more accessible. I have found that due to the limited size of the 'prabhag', the elected corporator often stays very close within the locality that he/she represents and hence is more liab...

The Planning Studio in Goa happened mid February and since then my brain is processing two important pieces of information. One, is the Communidade Code of Land management in Goa's villages and Second, the Tragedy of Commons. The Tragedy of Commons ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons, for more information ), is a dilemma arising from a situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally, in their own self interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen. In the Tragedy of Commons however, there is an anomaly that 'common' property, is no one's property, while everyone uses it. But this is often mistaken for 'everyone's property (contradicting the theory of common property) and hence abused, competing with each other for a larger share of the resources. The Communidade Land Management system also has the concept of '...