JOIN USThe BBMP’s road history project held the promise of weeding out corruption and ushering in an era of transparency and accountability in road development projects. But its slow progress is proof of the power wielded by vested interests keen to stall it.
Rattled by the fake bills and work duplication scam two years ago, the BBMP had banked on a whole new concept to boost transparency and avoid further pitfalls: Road history. It was an unprecedented move, a remarkable task to map and record each of the city’s estimated 93,000 street and arterial roads. Designed to track every development work on a road and the associated funds, it promised a final clean-up of a corrupt machinery.
By its very design, the project was bound to meet stiff resistance from the well-entrenched vested interests within and outside the Palike. Two years of inaction and apathy that followed the project launch proved this beyond doubt. Data on barely a few thousand roads were actually fed into the system in 24 months, a task that could be accomplished in less than a month!
Project potential
The road history project was clearly not in the interests of the contractor-engineer lobby. They baulked at the prospect of what the new system could do: A drastic curbing of unwanted projects, a complete elimination of works duplication and double billing, and a transparency so advanced that any citizen could track how frequently a road has been asphalted / developed by keying in a unique road number.
In July 2012, the project completion was to take barely three months. GIS mapping with recent satellite imagery was to help trace the position, length and breadth of all the city roads.
Once this was ready, data about each road and its development history was to be entered into the system and made available online.
The software for the system was finally completed in February this year. But data entry on the roads has been delayed. Many feel this is a deliberate ploy to protect the contractor lobby. Kadu Malleswara ward corporator, Manjunath Raju, who had actively pursued this project as chairman of the Standing Committee on Taxation and Finance, says feeding road data should not take beyond 20 days, and the data validation another 10 days.
He feels the direction to speed up the work should come right from the top. “The BBMP commissioner had committed to get the road history project completed by August this year. He should not give a single work order until the entire road data is entered and validated,” says Raju.
Task not Herculean
It is not a Herculean task as it is made out to be, he reasons. The total number of roads in the 198 wards of BBMP works out to 460 roads per ward, each served by an assistant engineer. There is an assistant executive engineer for every three wards and an executive engineer for every assembly constituency of about seven wards. These engineers and the Palike men at their command could easily feed the necessary data in a month.
The road history project was a byproduct of the hugely successful Property Identification Number (PID), a property tax system based on GIS mapping of properties in the BBMP jurisdictional area. The PID number is a combination of the ward number- street number and plot number in that order. A unique street number has been assigned to each and every street and within the street, a property number is assigned.
Thanks to the PID system, the number of properties that were taxed in Bangalore rose dramatically from 8.70 lakh in 2011-12 to 16.29 lakh. Of these, 14 lakh properties have already been validated. The BBMP’s tax revenue base increased substantially. So did transparency, as any citizen could now type the PID number of any property online and access the tax paid details from the Palike site.
Unique road ID
The unique road ID system follows the same principle as PID, without the property / plot number. Streets from North to South are assigned odd numbers in a clockwise direction, while streets from East to West are assigned even numbers. The roads are categorized as arterial, inter-ward (streets that pass through multiple wards) and ward roads. By identifying each road on the basis of a definite numbering system linked to the unique ward and inter-ward street numbers, duplication is avoided. This way, vested interests cannot generate work and purchase orders for developing a road the second time by giving different names to the same road. Double billing gets tougher.
Palike insiders reveal that once the contractor-engineer lobby got wind of the real purpose behind the road ID system, they tried to slow down the process. As things stand now, it remains virtually stalled, with only a 10th of the city’s roads covered.
The benefit of the road history project extends to the consumers of Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) as well. Once the online record of all the GIS-mapped roads is completed, it can be integrated to the BWSSB drainage and drinking water pipeline network.
This effectively means pilferage of water through illegal connections, faulty billings and distribution of water through the various main and secondary valves could be easily tracked. Consumers could then raise informed questions with the authorities concerned.
Better coordination
Another key benefit of road history is vastly improved coordination between various civic agencies such as BBMP, BWSSB, Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM) and the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL).
Currently, BBMP has to seek a No Objection Certificate (NOC) from the other agencies before it could go ahead with any development project. For instance, if the Palike takes up asphalting work of a road without this NOC, it could end up redoing the same job after a road-cutting by, say, BESCOM. A unique road ID, with all records available online, will negate the need for such cumbersome NOCs.
To avoid frequent road digging, BBMP had envisaged permanent underground utility ducts under the TenderSURE project on 73.5 kilometers of road. But this plan too progressed at a snail’s pace as the Palike found it tough to find bidders for its tenders. This project has now finally taken off with 10 roads. A network of such roads with futuristic design and functionality, combined with a fully data-validated online road history system might just check the unbridled march of the corruption brigade!