Bengaluru deserves better

Imagine you are on a highway and your vehicle breaks down due to a major engine fault. The driver tells you that he will add 20 litres of petrol to the 15 litres already in the tank, claiming this will get it running at
100 km per hour. Sounds absurd, right?

Yet, that is exactly the logic Bengaluru Development Minister D K Shivakumar appears to be following.

The city’s governance is broken, but his solution is simply to pump in more money—Rs 20,000 crore in the latest BBMP budget—without fixing the core issues.

Money alone won’t solve Bengaluru’s problems. Over Rs 1 lakh crore has been spent on the city in the last decade, yet its civic state has worsened. The real issue is how that money is spent — and how decisions are made.

Bengaluru needs CAT — Citizen Participation, Accountability, and Transparency.

Citizen participation: Empowering area sabhas and ward committees is essential. Area sabhas, comprising residents from each neighbourhood, should identify local needs and direct funds accordingly to the wards. Shockingly, the new Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill (GBGB) eliminates Area Sabhas altogether. This clearly shows the government’s disinterest in governance with citizen participation. The GBGB must re-incorporate area sabhas and devolve real powers to the Ward Committees as recommended by the Brand Bengaluru Committee.

A city of Bengaluru’s size and economic significance needs a mayor vested with executive authority, a fixed five-year term, power to appoint a Council of Ministers at the city level, and direct control over the Chief Commissioner and city bureaucracy. Mayors of major cities across the world are not merely ceremonial figures but are the driving force behind urban development and administration. The lack of such authority in Bengaluru is evident in its deteriorating governance; more power is concentrated with MLAs and the State. Governance must be decentralised, and the mayor and corporators held directly accountable to citizens.

Accountability: Each ward receives Rs 100-200 crore for ward development and maintenance over five years. However, nearly 50% of projects are awarded to a single agency without tenders. Corruption thrives in the opaque system. BBMP accounts must be internally audited and published regularly; the last audit was published in 2020-2021. If groups like BNP
can publish the BBMP project data from 2015 to 2020, why can’t BBMP?

Transparency: Transparency is the first step to fighting corruption. Project information, budgets, timelines and outcomes must be made publicly accessible.

Fix the basics

Before introducing new laws and governance structures, the government must implement the existing ones. BBMP elections have been delayed for nearly five years, leaving the city without elected representatives. Lack of accountability has allowed inefficiencies, corruption and leakages to flourish. The government must ensure that the city’s existing governance framework functions as intended, adhering to the existing BBMP Act.

Bengaluru scored a dismal 3.0 in the 2017 Annual Survey of India’s City-Systems (ASICS)—reflecting long-standing governance failure and the city’s broken civic administration.

It is no surprise the governor has returned the GBGB to the Assembly for revision. This intervention offers a crucial opportunity for lawmakers to rectify the GBGB’s flaws before it becomes yet another failed experiment in urban governance. The government must use this to restore citizen participation by reinstating area sabhas, strengthen the mayor’s role to ensure accountability, and ensure full transparency in BBMP’s functioning.

It is deeply troubling that Bengaluru’s residents must repeatedly demand such basic democratic reforms—empowered local governance, transparency, and adherence to constitutional mandates—when these should be fundamental to any well-functioning administration. Bengaluru is a global city and a critical economic hub. It deserves a governance system that is efficient, transparent, and responsive, not a bureaucratic framework that complicates problems instead of solving them. In its current form, the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill, 2024, is a missed opportunity and a failure. If the government is serious about fixing Bengaluru, it must go back to the drawing board and deliver real,
meaningful reform—before it’s too late.

(The writer is the founder of the Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party)