Bengaluru will get five municipal corporations, confirms Deputy CM D K Shivakumar

Bengaluru: Nearly three months after the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act (GBGA) came into force, Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar on Tuesday revealed that the Greater Bengaluru area will have a total of five municipal corporations. 

This confirms that the splitting of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is certain. 

Speaking to Congress party workers in the city, Shivakumar said the government was eager to hold elections and share power with party members. 

"We have already formed the Greater Bengaluru Authority. A committee headed by MLA Rizwan Arshad worked on this. We will certainly form five corporations now. Some citizens are opposed to it, but such a structure is necessary to improve administration," he said. 

This is the first time that the government has disclosed the number of corporations it plans to create in place of the BBMP, although top officials and the Brand Bengaluru committee have been working on the restructuring for several months. 

Sources said that work on demarcating the boundaries of each of the five corporations is nearly complete. Each corporation will consist of a set of assembly constituencies, although some segments may see their boundaries split across two corporations due to geographical constraints. The forthcoming state cabinet meeting is likely to take a final decision before an official notification is issued. 

The GBGA, which came into effect on April 25, allows 120 days to complete the formation of the Greater Bengaluru Authority as well as the finalisation of corporation boundaries. 

With just 40 days remaining, the government is under pressure to meet the deadline. Notably, an all-party meeting of Bengaluru MLAs on the matter has yet to be convened, despite Shivakumar assuring that all stakeholders would be consulted before finalising the plan. 

In two months, Bengaluru will complete five years without an elected body. The last BBMP elections were held in August 2015 and the new council was sworn in the following month. Since then, elections have been repeatedly delayed under the pretext of governance reforms, leaving citizens without local representation and struggling to get everyday civic issues addressed.