Parking in New Delhi

There have been enough articles written on the topic of the “parking mafia”. Interestingly, the MCD (Municipal Corporation of Delhi) and the NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Corporation), which sub contract the enforcement of parking and fee collection in Delhi is more at fault than the mafia themselves. The over-zealous contractors have only capitalized on the apathy of the governing bodies and succumbed to human nature’s natural drawback…greed! As a result the hapless vehicle owner can only write about it in the press or vent their frustration by verbally (or even physically) assaulting parking attendants – the ones acting on the whims of their employers, the parking mafia.

So, what is the problem? If you take away the highly complicated and impenetrable bureaucracy that surrounds the auctioning of parking spots by the civic authorities to these parking contractors, the problem is fairly simple. It cannot be very complicated – there are only 4 stakeholders – the civic authorities, the parking contractors, parking attendants and the vehicle owners. The parking lots are auctioned at cut throat reserve rates (this is the minimum amount of money the enforcer has to pay to the civic authority) – the contractor needs to collect at least this money over the course of the contract period from the vehicle owners. Anything collected over this amount is shared (again, using some highly complicated formula) between the civic authorities and the contractor. This arrangement is prone to the following problems:

1. Stakeholder 1 [The Civic Authority] – The civic authority is out-sourcing the parking menace in an ever growing metropolis – while, their intent of giving away work to private contractors is well founded, their choice of contractors based on an auction without prior background checks or a comprehensive list of quality guidelines is a recipe for disaster.
2. Stakeholder 2 [The Contractor] – The contractor having won the money making contract is trying to maximize their profits. Resultantly, they under pay their attendants and use unscrupulous means of increasing their revenue (the most common technique used is to park cars illegally causing choke points). The formula is simple – more cars means more money and hence more profits.
3. Stakeholder 3 [The Parking Attendants] – The parking attendants cannot sustain themselves on the daily wage given by the contractor. So, they pocket some of the proceeds by not issuing parking tickets or in some cases, the contractor themselves encourage this practice to avoid “sharing the profit” with the civic authority – one would assume, that the contractor gives a “bonus” to the attendant for willfully doing something illegal.
4. Stakeholder 4 [The vehicle owners] – Remember, human inclination to give in to greed? Well, if someone offers a parking spot for half the legal amount, how many people have the strength of character to refuse? So, this sect completes the chain and fuels this flourishing business.

The civic authorities have tried some innovative schemes like hourly parking (using hand held parking ticketing machines issued to the parking attendants) and differential costs for parking in different areas… but, all these have had limited success. They are not addressing any of the problems listed above. So, here are a few recommendations that can make life easy for everyone:

1. Get rid of the process of auctioning of parking lots to contractors – Instead, create a list of contractors (based on strict eligibility criteria) and randomly assign parking lots to this list of contractors. In return, the contractors are given a fixed fee per lot (this is mutually agreed upon at the beginning of the contract period and is validated at the end of every year). The guidelines need to clearly call out the minimum salary given to parking attendants.
2. Get rid of tickets! Issue a zonal quarterly parking fee per class of vehicle. A bar coded sticker will be issued to a vehicle which will have the registration number of the vehicle and the validity of the sticker – a different color per zone makes it easy for visual identification for the parking attendants. Parking attendants are issued hand held bar code reading devices.
3. An out of zone vehicle is issued a parking pass for a fee. The parking attendants use the hand held devices to create these fee based parking tickets. To minimize issuance of parking tickets, lucrative schemes can be created to encourage people to buy multi zone stickers or stickers for multiple cars (volume discount).
4. A vehicle without a zonal parking permit is similar to a vehicle without registration – they can be penalized by the traffic police if they have a Delhi registration.

Thats it! If the MCD/ NDMC tried this out across Delhi as a pilot, we could see much greater harmony in the public-private partnership and also a lot of goodwill for the civic authority (they definitely need some!).

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