Move to transfer BDA commissioner opposed

The state government’s plan to remove G Kumar Naik, an IAS officer of the 1990-batch, as commissioner at the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), has "shocked" allottees of Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Layout, which has been seeing ‘steady’ progress after a gap of two years.

Naik was brought to the helm of BDA after the Supreme Court showed the doors to his predecessor Rajesh Gowda for 'disobeying' its orders on site allotments.

Top sources in the Urban Development department (UDD) confirmed to DH that Kumar Naik is among the list of IAS officers who will be transferred this week. The move comes barely three months ahead of the state assembly polls.

Kumar Naik, who is the additional chief secretary at Energy Department, was posted as BDA commissioner only at August-end last year.

Surya Kiran, the office-bearer of the Nadaprabhu Kempegowda Layout Open Forum, termed the government's proposed move as "shocking." "What the BDA could not achieve in the two years was delivered in the last five months. The commissioner has been holding weekly meetings to clear all hurdles. Now, most of the engineering issues have been resolved. There has been considerable progress even in acquiring left-out notified lands. Naik had set a benchmark," he said.

Kiran was of the opinion that the transfer of Naik would bring a bad name to the government. "The BDA needs a senior IAS officer who can put an end to all types of irregularities. Appointing a junior, particularly a KAS-promotee IAS officer will only reverse all the good work," he said.

From preparing a master plan for Bengaluru and taking up the 65-km peripheral ring road to fixing poorly-implemented Nadaprabhu Kempegowda and Arkavathi layouts, the BDA has plenty of responsibilities but it has done little to earn praise from citizens.