In most modern democracies, it’s reasonable to expect a simple exchange: You vote for a set of candidates and pave their path to power. Then, they ignore you for five years. This equation, however, is completely flipped in the most functional form of governance in Indian cities—the Resident Welfare Association (RWA).
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.
The RWA might be the only elected body in India that actually exercises substantive power over your daily life. Our civics textbooks likely need an upgrade, considering that these society welfare associations enforce laws they’ve devised themselves – no matter if it violates a fundamental right or two. 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.
Unofficial civic bodies
In places like Gurugram, where municipal authorities have abdicated their basic responsibilities, RWA concerns align perfectly with actual civic needs. Every monsoon in the Millennium City, entire sectors turn into sewage lakes. The city’s waste management and sanitation have been under the scanner for months. Often, the RWA is the only embankment against complete civic breakdown.
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. Two months ago, more than 60 bodies resolved to take over sanitation duties from the municipal corporation, in addition to their other responsibilities. The previous municipal commissioner even gave in-principle approval, although a formal policy is yet to be notified. The arrangement has become so normalised that government bodies now actively recruit RWAs, as the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram did when it invited housing associations to take over community centres, offering financial assistance in return.
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.
It isn’t just upscale gated societies that benefit from RWAs. Lower down the socio-economic ladder, RWAs in areas like Kalkaji Extension’s DDA colony have stepped in to combat the problem of drugs being dealt to children. A recent report in the Indian Express pointed out that the Madanpur Khadar RWA routinely helps out village residents. When one didn’t have enough money to bring home a relative’s corpse, the RWA made up the shortfall. “We don’t get any government funds but we keep a record of all that we collect. If someone isn’t well, we try to help,” said Abdul Wari, public secretary of the RWA.
Delhi’s Bhagidari system institutionalised this dynamic, creating formal partnerships between government and RWAs to address urban infrastructure problems. Monthly meetings and workshops positioned housing committees as essential partners in urban governance. The scheme worked, but it blurred crucial boundaries. Where did the RWA’s powers begin and end?
Also read: RWAs are waging a war against Muslims—within societies, on WhatsApp groups
Republic of RWAs
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.
In Entangled Urbanism, Sanjay Srivastava writes: “In almost all cases, RWA office-holders are elected to their positions (of President, Secretary, etc), with elderly males constituting a substantial number. There is a tendency to favour retired officers of the armed forces as RWA functionaries, perhaps seeking to attach the aura of military discipline to that of the modern housing locality.” This entity, you might recognise from your own building WhatsApp group, is the ubiquitous RWA uncle.
Three kinds of people are always in a good RWA uncle’s crosshairs: unmarried men and women, community dog feeders, and domestic and blue-collar workers who keep middle-class life functional. But an RWA uncle’s anxieties about the world, shaped by decades of thinking in hierarchies, ought to remain at his dinner table. The trouble begins when a community bylaw contravenes the Constitution.
Domestic workers are the most powerless in this equation – they are in no position to negotiate that they be treated as humans. Across India, society bodies issue illegal circulars with abandon and impunity, barring domestic workers from using common areas like elevators, lobbies, and landscaped gardens. Less than a month ago, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation had to issue directives to RWAs of high-rise apartments to ensure that postmen had unhindered access to lifts and parking spaces. “This directive must be treated with utmost importance to uphold the dignity of public service and to ensure smooth and efficient delivery of postal services to citizens of Hyderabad,” the body had noted.
Covid-19 unleashed the full potential of RWA tyranny. The pandemic was an excuse for these bodies to transform their societies into “lateral surveillance” states. Central and state governments enlisted their help to contain the pandemic, granting unprecedented powers to track residents, screen visitors, and monitor health data through community apps.
In the early days of the pandemic, when the first lockdowns were being enforced around India, RWAs circulated a list “with names, addresses, flight details, passport numbers and contact information of 722 residents of South Delhi who had travelled to covid-19-affected countries”. The list was ostensibly circulated for health monitoring, but effectively, it meant social policing.
That policing impulse has continued. Last year, Suranya Aiyar, daughter of Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, was issued a letter by the Jangpura RWA, asking her to vacate the house. She wasn’t even a resident of the colony. The provocation? Her social media posts criticising the Ram Mandir consecration ceremony. The letter stated: “What Ms Aiyar said through social media was unbecoming of an educated person, who should have understood that the Ram Mandir was being built after 500 years and that too after a 5-0 Supreme Court verdict.”
Here’s something else the courts have consistently said: RWAs do not have the legal authority to ban anyone from buying or renting property. Fundamental rights are not association-specific privileges that these bodies can grant or revoke.
Still, the Constitution can only promise you rights, but your RWA uncle decides if you get to exercise them. And the Republic of RWAs will never give up that sweet power. Not when functional despotism has a better score than dysfunctional democracy.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)