In India’s gated communities and neighbourhoods, you elect people who decide how long you are allowed to stay out on a weeknight or who you come home with. They monitor your guests, dictate your diet, and decide whether your domestic help can touch elevator buttons. In the time that it takes your area’s babu to get you to sign an application in triplicate, your RWA may already have banned unmarried men and women, capped domestic workers’ wages, installed facial recognition systems, and possibly expelled someone for their social media posts.
https://theprint.in/opinion/republic-of-rwas-india/2718951/
RWAs have achieved what political scientists can only dream of: a government that responds immediately to citizen concerns. The only problem is that RWA’s definition of citizen concerns probably varies greatly from yours.
In places like Gurugram, where municipal authorities have abdicated their basic responsibilities, RWA concerns align perfectly with actual civic needs.
Gurugram’s RWAs already maintain local parks, manage water supply, and are involved in the upkeep of green belts – services that municipal taxes should have covered. In Bengaluru, several RWAs have moved beyond basic maintenance into environmental stewardship, installing solar panels and rainwater harvesting systems. At Century Saras Apartment, 128 units can meet their water needs for an entire month during the monsoon season, without tapping into groundwater reserves. They save 1.25 crore liters annually, roughly one-third of their total consumption.
The same organisational prowess that makes RWAs effective at management also makes them terrifyingly efficient at manufacturing arbitrary rules. These committees reflect the biases and prejudices of the people who run them, now armed with quasi-governmental authority.
But efficiency without accountability breeds a particular kind of abuse of power.