Shadowing the Additional Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai
I spent a week in February 2023 during my Spring break shadowing the Additional Municipal Commissioner of the Eastern Suburbs of Mumbai, Ms. Ashwini Bhide, a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service. She also holds a second post as the Managing Director of the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation. Over the course of the week, I followed her through the activities demanded by both her posts. She spends 3 days of the week at the BMC office and 2 at the Metro office. I was thus able to see the difference in the kinds of activities and duties between both the posts. It was the first time I was shadowing a woman in a position of power so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But what I saw definitely surprised me because it was so different from what I had been exposed to before
Day 1
Ms. Bhide had a pretty big office at the BMC headquarters and a large team of assistants working under her. The authority and power she wielded was apparent from the second I stepped foot in her office which always had people in and out of it with papers for her to sign or documents to read.
The first meeting of hers I sat through was to settle a land dispute between 19 different parties who had all sent their representatives. Each party owned a small section of the land and so they all had a stake in what was to be done with that piece of land. Ms. Bhide sat at the head of the table while 19 men sat around it, all eager to speak and be louder than the other, but who would all shut up when she started speaking. The sight was actually quite comical. The meeting was in Marathi so I didn’t understand all of it and when I went over my notes from that week I only found the following written as a summary for the meeting - “19 men of different ages, degrees of balding, outfits, language proficiency, vocal ranges, varyingly heightened egos sit around a table, attempting to exploit their physical proximity to the head of the table or jogging back and forth, servile almost, leaping at the slightest pause to explain and reexplain their point of view, and posing each time as though they’ve been struck by a unique stroke of brilliance, to prey on the perceived ignorance of the others to mistake repetition for coherence.”
It was fascinating and deeply refreshing to see how much respect Ms. Bhide garnered. I remember entering the meeting room and getting a lot of confused looks in my direction, unspoken “who is she and why is she here?” expressions. But then Ms. Bhide would give one line of introduction for me, legitimizing my presence there, and suddenly everyone's expressions would change and they would even smile at me if we made eye contact.
Day 2
Ms. Bhide was insanely busy with back-to-back meetings all day but she took out time between her commitments to talk to me and answer my questions about the administrative arm of the government. During informal discussions with her, I also got her thoughts on a number of questions I had about the government in general. She believed one of the most significant changes in the government in recent years was the increase in transparency due to the rise of social media and introduction of the RTI Act, both of which also encouraged greater criticism of the government. Although that is a positive change as it incites reform in the government and its systems, Ms. Bhide also revealed that very often the fear of backlash causes officials to delay important decisions or not make them at all, leading to inefficiency in the administration. This was an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered before; it was refreshing to obtain a unique insight from someone within the system.
While signing documents and answering LAQs (questions from the legislature to the administration), Mr. Bhide expanded on the differences between politics and administration. A notable distinction she made was that politicians tend to be more in touch with the people, which is something administrators should strive to do too, to be able to recognise the real problems of the citizens.
Her meetings today were not just with external parties but also with internal parties. For example, she met with the representative of an IT company that had been hired by the BMC but which was in conflict with her office’s IT team on some issue. Her job entailed resolving not just external disputes but also internal ones like this.
Day 3
Although Ms. Bhide was extremely busy in meetings with high-profile politicians and officials all day, she always kept time for the small fish too. She listened patiently to an ex-councillor who wanted another CBSE school to be set up in her ward because the one that was there was doing extremely well and received more applicants than it could handle. She also gave a full hour of her time to a representative of an NGO who was lobbying for more government funding. Ms. Bhide was immensely receptive in such meetings, listening intently to her guest and explaining what could realistically be done about the issue. Even when the administration did not have the capacity to do much in a certain situation, Ms. Bhide would use refrains like “your point is well taken” to make the complainant feel listened to, something she herself described as being an important part of being a good administrator.
This was my last day in her BMC office as the rest of the two days of the week she spent at her MMRDA office.
Day 4
In the Metro office, which I was told was a temporary setup, everything from the kinds of employees to the interiors of the office was starkly different from the BMC one. The location of the office was in BKC, the heart of modern office setups, and every part of the office reflected its location; this was in contrast to the BMC office which was in Fort, the historic part of the city which was full of public sector offices. Even the kinds of meetings Ms. Bhide had here were in contrast to those at the BMC office. Here, there were barely any politicians and most meetings were conducted with businessmen involved with different parts of the construction or functioning of the metro.
Ms. Bhide seemed to have even more meetings lined up in this office than in the other one, if that was possible. The meetings here would all be conducted in English as opposed to Marathi in the other office, and the men (I hardly saw any women in any of her meetings) were dressed in suits as opposed to kurtas. Some of them were even foreigners who headed companies that the administration had contracted out work to. In these meetings too, like at the BMC office, Ms. Bhide primarily served the role of mediator, propelling the meeting towards resolution when the different parties would be locked in a stalemate, each attempting to defend his point of view.
There was another meeting with the depot where the primary issue was the inefficiency in production of certain formations, which was taking place at a rate much less than that promised in the contract. Terms like “driverless train” took me by surprise as I didn’t realize the administration had the modern technology required for developments like that. Here too, Ms. Bhide helped drive impasses towards a solution.
Day 5
The day began with a meeting with the company Padeco about the possibility of installing a toll booth in the city. Ms. Bhide had other administrative functions apart from the metro that she would handle from this office too. Another meeting later discussed the declaration of a no-parking zone near a statue to preserve its sanctity.
One interesting thing I noticed was that she was surrounded by people in her office all day, whether businessmen in meetings or politicians or anyone from her extensive office staff. But she would eat lunch alone everyday in her office. I had started eating in another room today because she was in a meeting but when it ended and she began her lunch, she invited me to join her. I figure it’s lonely at the top.
