Usually presented soon after the state budget, the BBMP’s annual budget has not been filed yet owing to disagreements between ministers and senior IAS officers on ward funds.
The state budget was presented on March 4.
The disagreements between MLAs and bureaucrats have come to the fore because the BBMP has been without an elected council since September 2020.
While MLAs want the BBMP to set aside Rs 2-3 crore per ward for “developmental” activities, bureaucrats want the allocation to be no more than Rs 90 lakh, citing fiscal discipline.
In the past, the BBMP had set aside special grants (Rs 2 crore for every ward falling in the core area and Rs 3 crore each for those in the outer areas) for the discretionary use of corporators.
In the absence of an elected body, the BBMP allocated only Rs 60 lakh per ward in 2021-2022 and has offered to increase it to Rs 90 lakh in the next fiscal year.
Ministers and MLAs now want a minimum allocation of Rs 2 crore per ward. Ministers are believed to have brushed aside concerns expressed by officials that such an allocation would have little scope for new and long-term projects.
With the disagreements still unresolved, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, who holds the Bengaluru development portfolio, has called a meeting on Thursday morning. The date for presenting the budget may be fixed at the meeting.
Additional Chief Secretary (Urban Development Department) and BBMP administrator Rakesh Singh confirmed as much.
Senior bureaucrats have been trying to reduce unnecessary expenditure ever since the BBMP was brought under a special law that does not allow the expenditure to exceed estimated revenues.
If the size of the BBMP’s budget is about Rs 9,000 crore, almost half of the money will go towards meeting overheads such as salaries and maintaining parks, streetlights and buildings.
Meanwhile, the BBMP has received 7,238 responses from citizens under the My City My Budget campaign — supported by NGO Janaagraha. A majority of the responses were about public toilets — building new ones or maintaining the existing ones. There were 2,188 responses about footpaths and 1,760 about parks.