Regarding Adm Prakash's piece:
The fundamental weakness of the Indian system is that it is poor at execution at the local level. While we are a federal system, the concentration of political, administrative and financial power is more unitary than federal in nature.
The fundamental process for political elevation is gaining power at the state level. Not at the city level, but state level. The system places more emphasis on winning a poll than administering well, because there's no penalty for performing badly. Well sure, they can lose an election, but the next party faces exactly the same situation, which means zero systemic incentive to perform, as opposed to find ways to win.
Further, our cities have no independent power to tax or utilize the revenues generated within. It goes to the state, and then to centre, before being disbursed back to state level. Unless you have states whose demographic profile puts them at aggregate urban:rural population close to or better than 50:50, the result is an incentive towards cross subsidization of the rural vote using urban revenues. The national urban:rural ratio is 31:69 . Slide 25 of the
census document shows that every socio-economically developed state is also extremely urbanized (by Indian measures).
Urbanization feeds development, but we don't incentivize urbanization. One might ask 'what about all those people moving to cities ?' Sure, they move because of better circumstances than in their village. But the city accomodates them. The political and administrative framework is not geared towards encouraging their move, and more importantly, towards investing in the cities to encourage their move into the city in a planned manner. Instead, cities are sources of revenue meant to win the state. Investing in the city itself is not a political imperative, except in the case of New Delhi - which already looks a decade more advanced than any other city in India. The average Indian city is overburdened with a vastly greater population its amenities can support, with no political incentive to channel the productive output of the population to constantly improve their quality of life, other than when the people rise up in arms in anger.
There's a popular desire to blame the politicians' corruption as the root of all ills. Personally, I don't think that's the primary issue here. They are the professional leeches in every system - in India, PRC, US or elsewhere. I'm more inclined to look at how well the development of the system is in line with their own gain. In a system where they are both roughly aligned, there will be a substantial development within the system.
While a good conscientious governance system (since the Gujarat model is so popular these days) can fix some problems, it doesn't fix everything. Governance doesn't in itself eliminate the issue of funding. A properly run city requires massive civic investment. Even in GJ, there are ample stories of funds being denied just to spite them.
Further, such a model is currently unstable and non-sustaining. It depends on one man. In some situations, that one man is enough. Think Park Chung Hee for example. But as it stands, its an unstable case. The best possible scenario would be that the urban-focussed governance model becomes a political ticket because of the success of one example. That requires several things - willingness to emphasize urbanization and stop romanticizing the rural life, effective investment within the urban areas to support the incoming population, and progressively manipulating the political process such that power at national level arises from administrative success at the urban city level.
In PRC that's how they run the ship. There is no political imperative to compete since it's a one party system. The emphasis is on showing accomplishment to get ahead politically. Name a PRC leader who was elevated to leadership from being a state boss. There are none that come to mind; Xi Jinping was Fujian governor, but that was more than a decade ago. Their leaders are of two types - those who came up party ranks, and those who were city bosses. Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji were both successive Shanghai mayors in the 1980s before elevation to replace Deng. The now disgraced Bo Xilai was mayor of Chongqing.
Their system works like this - you make your name by running a city well, get elevated to the politburo, hopefully make the standing committee and then try to become premier/president. There's no political incentive to invest in the rural and provincial hinterland - that is a place they treat as the source of raw material, grain and labor. The result is that investment in development focuses on urbanization, because that's the ticket to political gain - gain visibility by running a small town/city well and head up the gravy train.
One particular aspect of their system I find very interesting is that they still manage a clear transfer of power. However, I do not know how resilient that system is. Clearly, the original intent was to prevent another Mao from happening, but institutional memory is only so long, and Hu Jintao's generation was the last one to really experience those days. I don't see any compelling reason why a current or future Chinese leader will not aggrandize himself again - their system has no explicit checks against it happening.
Further, they split off several major cities from their respective provinces, as direct controlled municipaltiies - Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing are all independent of their surrounding provinces. One does not need influence in Sichuan to be a big shot in Chongqing. This system is biased towards urbanization, which is why they are seeing the greatest urbanization in history - to the extent that they'll invest in building entire cities up in a few years. In addition, their residency (hukou) system enables them to control the movement of population, so that they both have a political system geared towards urban investment and development, and a means to control the movement of population into those cities. Is it any surprise their cities look vastly better ?