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Proposed administrative procedure - TR.02
RLPP over City Road Developers

Purpose : To ensure minimal wastage and siphoning of funds in development/maintainance of city roads


    Contents
  1. Developing/maintaining city roads
  2. RLPP over City Road developers
  3. Draft of the act to create procedure TR.02

Problems in developing/maintaining city roads

The roads can be divided into two main groups --- highways and roads inside a town/city. Typically, the roads in city are meant for pedestrians, cyclists as well as motor vehicles while highways are mainly meant for motor vehicles. Another important difference is that the highways can be funded by tolls to a considerable extent while collecting tolls on city-roads is not possible as of today. Thus taxes to maintain highway can be redcued if tolls are sufficient, but taxes to maintain city-roads are must. So technologically, road and highways are similar but for administrative system, they need to be managed separately.

Following are the technical/physical issues involved in maintaining the roads in a city
  1. footpaths
  2. path dividers
  3. signals
  4. controlling speeds
  5. speed breakers
  6. separate lanes for cycles and 2 wheelers
  7. parking
  8. widening the road later on
In short, designing a city road has lots and lots of considerations. It is difficult to make micro-rules to decide if a design is good or bad. Only the discretion of majority/Jury can resolve such questions.

In procedure TR.01 , I outlined how funds for road development can be collected and distributed. Now lets say a city gets some funds from central/state govts and in addition, it obtains additional funds for road development using vehicle tax, gasoline tax, property tax etc. Now how can citizens ensure that funds are not blatantly siphoned out or misused?

The procedure TR.02, namely "RLPP over City Road Developer" enables the citizens in ensuring that.


RLPP over City Road developers

  1. The Mayor will appoint a City Road Developer for managing city roads, streets etc.

  2. The citizens can replace the City Road Developer using RLPP. For details on RLPP to replace officer, please click .

  3. Funds for development of the roads : The Road Developer may get funds from Central/State Govt. In addition to that, he may propose to the City Council, an annual tax on vehicles, a sales tax on petrol/diesel or property tax on commercial land plots adjacent wide roads, and paking fees on city-owned plots/strips meant for parking

  4. The Road Administrator can employ employees ONLY via an open competitive exam or would need permission from Grand Jurors. The citizens may expel any of his employee after a Jury Trial, if the need be.

  5. For each development work, the Road Developer will publish the design 60 days before the tenders are invited. In the meantime, if a citizen can present the arguments to the Grand Jurors that the design will be inconvenient for pedestrians or senior citizens or cyclists or anyone else, or the project is unduely given higher priority. , to the Grand Jury may call a Jury to examine the design. The Jury may cancel the design/tender as well as the contract. If a citizen has evidences of wasteful expenses or corruption in the project, he may present the evidences before the Grand Jury who may call a Jury to examine the evidences in detail. The Jury may cancel the project.

  6. For each development work, the contractor would get the payment 1 year after a specific stage of the contract has been completed. In the meantime, if a citizen can submit evidences of poor-quality before the Grand Jurors, the Grand Jurors may call a Jury to examine the evidences in detail. If the over 7 out of 10 Jurors declare that the work's quality was below the specification, the contractor will get only the payment that has been approved by the Jurors. In the worst case, the contractor may not get any payment.

  7. To build/maintain the streets, the Road Administrator can create a city-owned engineering setup similar to PWD or hire private contractors or do both.

These procedures are more than sufficient to improve the city roads


Draft of the act to create procedure TR.02

To enact TR.02, the citizens need to pass an act City Council (or District Panchayats) respectively. For the draft of the act, please click here.

     It will be wiser for citizens to first enact procedure LM.01, and then use them to pass this act. To know about procedure LM.01, please click here.


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