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Dinesh Mehta
Dinesh Mehta is a Professor Emeritus at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, where he teaches urban management, urban finance and development planning. He was the Director of School of Planning, CEPT, Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India, head of urban management programme at UN-HABITAT, Nairobi. Dr. Mehta has a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania, a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Technology in Civil Engineering, from IIT Madras, India.
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15th Finance Commission: Covid-19 warrants rethink of local government allocations
The 15th Finance Commission has made significant departures from the previous Central Finance Commissions in its recommendations for urban local governments, in its interim report for 2020-21. In this post, Mehta and Mehta highlight these and provide some suggestions for consideration in the final report, especially with regard to increasing allocation for sanitation, and making available more untied funds for urban local governments to enable them to meet exigencies of Covid-19-like situations.
Financing Sanitation
The Government of India has set a rather ambitious goal of eliminating open defecation by 2019. For urban areas, this implies providing toilets to about 22 million households. This column contends that it is possible to achieve this goal if the limited public funds are leveraged to facilitate innovative financing mechanisms, through a demand-led scheme for toilets.
14th Finance Commission: A trust-based approach towards local governments
The 14th Finance Commission has been hailed as ‘path-breaking’ for recommending larger fund allocations to state governments and giving them more autonomy in spending these funds. In this article, Meera Mehta and Dinesh Mehta highlight that the Commission has also recognised the need to trust and respect local government bodies, and has allocated much larger funds to them. Will this approach work and will state governments cooperate?
Open defecation in cities: A faltering India story
Despite significant public investment in urban sanitation, over 37 million people in Indian cities resort to open defecation. This column examines the existing information on open defecation in urban India, and finds that the most important determinant is access to on-premise toilets. Local government leadership, targeted and smart subsidies, stakeholder collaboration and innovative financing options can help increase such access and accelerate elimination of the problem.