Between a mirage and a charade

Do we need a new BBMP law to govern Bengaluru? Ever since the state government floated the idea of enacting new legislation for the governance of the capital region, there have been a number of events in the city at which this question has been discussed and debated. This isn’t a new question. In fact, it is one that comes up at the end of every term of the BBMP Council, for a very predictable reason.

We absolutely do not need any new legislation. It’s simplistic to say that many things have gone wrong, and we have to set them right through a new law. The truth is, many things have gone wrong because we have not implemented the existing laws correctly, and not because we haven’t found the perfect law yet.

Broadly, there are four things we need to keep our eyes on.

First, there has to be proper planning of the city and its surrounding region. The existing law law already provides for a Metropolitan Planning Committee to do this. This law is based on the Constitution’s 74th Amendment Act, passed in 1992. 28 years ago. But there is no functioning MPC yet. With such long-standing disregard for existing law, why should we imagine that something new will be magically different? Moreover, no new BBMP Bill can do much that is different from the existing law in regional planning, because anything we propose now will also need to be in line with the Constitution.

As for the Bengaluru Development Authority (BDA), which is in theory responsible for land use planning and infrastructure development in the city, it is clear that it has done a poor job of both. There’s a very good reason for that. We have a system in which BDA is both the planner and the implementing agency for its own plans. This mix-up of roles has made the agency choose awful plans for the city, which are more likely to lead to wasteful contracts for large projects managed by itself, rather than good outcomes for citizens.

Second, people’s participation in the governance of the city has to be the norm, not the exception. The Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act already provides for ward committees of local residents to be formed immediately after each election and gives them a strong role in decision-making at the ward level. But in the past two election cycles, BBMP did not even create these committees for years after the election, and then let them meander without any regularity or strength.

Third, cities need more executive powers to decide things themselves, and there have been some suggestions that we need a new law to achieve this. But here, too, the state government is on shaky ground. The existing provisions of law, again going back to the 74th Amendment Act, already say that many powers should be devolved from state governments to local councils. But this has not been done. Adding one more law to the list of what’s being ignored won’t help.

Moreover, if a Mayor has executive power over only a few things (such as roads and garbage), it won’t make much of a difference. The different parastatals for power (BESCOM) water supply (BWSSB), transport (BMTC and Metro), as well as the state control of education and health, law and order, and the economy have to be integrated into the executive structure of local governments. That’s how the world’s top cities do it. Until that happens, it won’t matter if we have a one-year Mayor or a five-year one. They will both be weak.

Fourth, it’s not right to propose to do things differently in Bengaluru alone. All the people of Karnataka have the right to be properly governed in their respective places. If something we propose is thought to be good for one city, we should ask, why not everywhere else, too? Plus, can we really leave out the peri-urban areas just outside Bengaluru, and still expect a new law to work, regardless? Of course the big city is different, and we may come to different methods for governing it, but the principles for governing all cities and towns should be the same.

In fact, there has been a persistent complaint over decades that we have paid excessive attention to Bengaluru, and failed to develop the rest of the state very much. The irony is that even with this uneven focus on one city, we have not seen any of the grand promises of the past come true, because that was never the goal.

Which brings us to the obvious question -- what’s the point of proposing a new law now? The open secret about this is that under the pretext of enacting a shiny new law, the elections to the municipal area are being postponed. This is a movie we have seen more than once already in Bengaluru, and in dozens of other cities and towns in the state repeatedly. At any given time, there are at least a dozen towns in the state where we can witness such delays.

Even the onset of such delays is very predictable. Towards the end of a council’s term, the government will float a plan for a grand new imagination. The routine exercise of delimiting the wards of the city to prepare for a new election will be delayed administratively first, and later under the pretext of preparing for a new law. These will ensure that the council is dissolved. After that, a long battle in the courts between citizens and governments will slowly lead to a muddled outcome many months later.

More legislation in the current situation is a mix of a mirage and a charade. There is only one new thing we need -- the political commitment to implement the laws that already exist. That would be truly different from the past, and also a much more credible step to take.

(The writer is an entrepreneur, activist and public thinker)