BBMP short of 1,600 employees, says reforms commission

The Karnataka Administrative Reforms Commission, which submitted its second report to the state on Friday, suggested staff overhaul and reorganisation of the BBMP, which now covers 243 wards.

The report goes on to recommend creating 1,644 additional posts across departments to decentralise administration, improve service delivery and attend to public grievances expeditiously.

The committee — headed by former chief secretary T V Vijay Bhaskar — finds that the BBMP’s present strength of 7,400 employees is much lesser than cities like Mumbai and Hyderabad. “This gross understaffing has seriously impacted citizen services, infrastructure quality and governance,” the report states.

The committee also finds lack of effective authority or mechanism for coordination among different BBMP departments at the zonal level.

Some of the changes suggested by the commission are creation of 30 new posts of deputy commissioners to coordinate with agencies in every zone, mandatory transfer of tax and revenue inspectors every five years to another ward and a different zone in every 10 years, and creation of an ‘Enforcement Cell’ to boost property tax assessment and collection, etc.

The report also found that there were approximately 7,588 cases pending in the legal department as of June 2022. The number of cases disposed of between June 2018 and May 2022 were only 786. “The case clearance rate is about 9% over 4 years, which is very low,” it said, recommending creation of a legal cell in every zone.

The committee recommends 181 additional posts of tax and revenue inspectors, 1,197 posts in the engineering department and close to 30 posts in the BBMP’s legal cell.