Good sometimes comes from bad and this encounter with municipal authority was beneficial because it made me realise yet again the urgent need for our cities to have elected governments accountable to the citizens and not some chief minister or prime minister.

Until this happens India’s towns and cities will continue to be polluted, festering slums. No amount of glittering new malls and five star hotels changes this ugly reality and no amount of well-meaning Central Government urban renewal missions will make a difference unless cities like Mumbai and Delhi have powerful elected mayors of the kind London and New York have.

What does dog shit have to do with municipal governance? Read on.

When I am in Mumbai, I live on Marine Drive, and my dog, Julie, is accustomed to taking her daily constitutional and performing her morning ablutions on this promenade. Of late this has become a problem because the Municipal Commissioner, Johnny Joseph, whimsically ordained that dog owners must clean up after their dogs or pay a penalty of Rs 500.

So, last Thursday, Julie had just finished doing her business when the official crept up on me and said, “Clean it now or pay.”

I told him that had the street been spotlessly clean I may have obliged but as it was a mess of paan spit, urine, pariah dog shit and rotting garbage I saw no need to.

I told him of a conversation I had with the Municipal Commissioner early on in the dog shit campaign, in which I had pointed out that in cities where dog-shit bans were in place the municipality distributed special bags and bins for this purpose. Assuming I agreed to clean up after Julie, where should I put it? As organic material it would shortly disintegrate but in Marine Drive’s prissy, little plastic bins, it would fester and stink.

The official looked puzzled and called his superior officer on his mobile phone. I persisted with my civil disobedience so he reported me to the police, who registered a case against me for violating dog-shit laws.

Thousands of rupees of taxpayers money will presumably now be spent on a court case and the city of Mumbai will continue to be filthy because, as usual, city officials are wasting their time and our money climbing the wrong hill.

Of the dog shit in the streets of Mumbai only a tiny percentage comes from well-bred dogs like Julie. Most of it comes from street dogs. Who is going to clean up after them? In any case should this be a priority? More than half of Mumbai’s citizens live in shanties so filthy that children grow up with the stench of untreated sewage.

Should low-cost housing not be a municipal priority? Should clean drinking water not be a priority? If Johnny Joseph took the trouble to visit a public toilet in one of these slums he would know that Mumbai needs thousands and thousands more public toilets and modern sewage facilities.

Every monsoon season shows us that the city desperately needs to modernise its ancient drainage system. Every terrorist act shows us it is purely because of the resilient spirit of ordinary citizens that the city picks itself up to face the next disaster and the next.

Municipal governance simply disappears. Not just in times of crisis but even in peace time, so every public building in the city, whether it is the courts, the railway stations or the Municipal Commissioner’s magnificent office, is in a dismal state of disrepair.

Many of these are fine, old Raj buildings and their neglect amounts to criminal vandalism. Instead of spending money on restoring these heritage buildings the municipality spent more than Rs 130 crore “beautifying” Marine Drive.

As someone who walks down it daily, let me say that it looks just like it did before and with its new paving stones already sullied by paan spittle, it’s hard to see the point of the very expensive makeover.

The day after my run-in with the dog shit squad the former senator from Nebraska, Bob Kerry, passed through Mumbai and was interviewed in a Mumbai newspaper.

Asked what he thought of the city he said, “What struck me the most was the weakness of the city government versus the state government. New York city, to which Mumbai bears a close resemblance, has a very strong mayor. A mayor with more powers would solve a lot of problems faced by the city.” I could not have put it better myself.