Several recent events demand a serious look at Bengaluru’s (mis)governance space. Foremost is the call by the BDA for a public consultation on the Revised Master Plan 2031 for Bengaluru when the constitutionally mandated Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) is not even in existence. In fact, several members of the MPC resigned in protest against the government’s failure to call even its first meeting, six months after its constitution.
Added to this are: the pointless dissolution of the BBMP Council four days before its term ended on the ground that there have been serious irregularities and scams in its working; the non-holding of BBMP elections before the end of the BBMP Council’s term on the ground that the BBMP needs to be restructured; and the Cabinet decision to trifurcate the BBMP without a rational analysis and justification accompanying it.
This decision was taken even before the BBMP Restructuring Committee gave its final report and it went against the committee’s interim recommendation to have a 3-tier structure in BBMP. Despite attempts to give the government’s decisions a veneer of rationality, citizens have discerned that these were mere cover-up ruses just to postpone the BBMP elections.
The results of the total misgovernance are there for all to see: large scale encroachments on all kinds of government lands – on lake beds, forest lands, CA sites, open spaces etc; illegal buildings most often sanctioned and authorised by BBMP itself by issuing valid licences and kathas and collecting property taxes; rampant violations of the zoning regulations and building bye-laws by 90 per cent of the properties necessitating periodic Akrama-Sakrama laws regularising the violations; frothing, polluted lakes as a result of blatant discharge of sewage and effluents into them, massive ground-water pollution and sinking groundwater levels; increasing number of slums, migrants living in pathetic conditions; crumbling schools; lack of primary healthcare centres, anganwadis and playgrounds; reduction in greenery by 60 per cent; hour-long traffic jams, ear-splitting noise pollution and asthma-causing air pollution.
As for the governance of the BBMP, the less said the better: heaps of mixed garbage at every street corner and stinking, uncleared mountains of it at illegal landfills making the life of villagers around them a misery; overflowing storm-water drains and clogged road-side drains that flood houses at the slightest rainfall; pot-holed roads; lakhs of unassessed properties, advertisement hoardings and trades eating into the revenues; unpaid bills and pledging of heritage structures to pay off debts; and to top it all, 1,000 files either burnt or sitting in private houses of influential persons, bogus bills, cheques with forged signatures of the Commissioner, scams worth thousands of crores; an absconding Chief Accounts Officer and criminal cases against several councillors!
To report to courts on action taken against encroachments, tahsildars are sending eviction notices to slum-dwellers living in slums ‘notified’ by the Slum Board. This ‘notification’ of the slum is supposed to protect them from eviction.
When questioned, Slum Board officials say they are not aware of what the tahsildars are doing. So, the slum-dwellers are sent on another round of running from pillar to post to get the notices withdrawn. The rich and powerful escape even these actions by the inaction of officials.
Regularisation of land
Small and marginal farmers, whose applications for regularisation of their ‘bagair hukum’ land are pending before the government, have also been served notices for eviction even as the Court has asked officials to go after the big encroachers and not target those who have encroached less than five acres of land. The government too keeps merely voicing that they will spare the ‘bagair hukum’ cultivators.
Hence, the vehement pro-tests led by freedom fighter H S Doreswamy and others against inaction by the government against large-scale land-grab out of greed by the powerful, especially by creating fake documents in connivance with officials, while punishing the small-scale violators, who do so out of need for their livelihood or shelter.
The biggest irony is that officials and others in power who abetted and connived in these crimes are safe and sound in their palatial houses built no doubt with the ill-gotten gains from their corrupt deals to allow these violations. Not a single action has been taken on any of them. The government which issued them all legal licences, NOCs and kathas now seems to be telling them, ‘Sorry, that was done just to fool you’. If people cannot trust their own government, it is the ultimate misgovernance. Justice demands that the houses and assets of those who permitted these violations are acquired/demolished first.
Since BBMP elections will be held in 2-3 months, let this period be used by all concerned to do an honest introspection over the misgovernance, bring out a white paper on all the misdemeanours that have led to this state of affairs, chalk out a road map to avoid these failures in the future, and devise a stringent monitoring mechanism to ensure that the road map is strictly followed.
(The writer is Executive Trustee of CIVIC, Bengaluru)