Decoding the noise around Greater Bengaluru bill

What the city needs is not a separate Act but a reimagined master plan and a functional metropolitan planning committee

Attempts to restructure the governance of Bengaluru through the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill (GBGB), 2024, have currently been stalled with the governor withholding his assent. Pressure from civil society played a substantive role.

Newspapers carried articles by and interviews with the members of the Brand Bengaluru Committee (BBC – the erstwhile BBMP Restructuring Committee) defending the bill as a ‘sliver of hope over the status quo’. Conspicuous by its absence is the voice of the planning community, a massive miss that merits a separate discussion. 

Debates around the relevance of the GBGB are gaining momentum amid several misinterpretations bordering on flawed understanding, especially of the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA), 1992, manifesting in wrong narratives. Below is an attempt at clarifying the issue.

Bengaluru has seen a slew of Acts and Bills, premised on the argument that the city’s governance challenges are unique and therefore need a dedicated Act.

The first is the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike Act, 2020, an independent legislation that seeks to improve decentralisation, integrate public participation in municipal governance and ensure efficient decision making by the BBMP. The Act claims that the provisions of the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, 1976, are inadequate to govern Bengaluru.

Next came the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill (GBGB, in multiple versions) by the BBC and tabled in a tweaked form by the Karnataka government. This bill, too, is premised on the argument that the BBMP Act does not institute any systems or processes that address the specific challenges that Bengaluru faces.

Bengaluru’s governance challenges — increasing inequality, unhinged urbanisation, multiplicity of organisations and a lack of coordination amongst others — are not unique to the city.

Rather, these issues plague most rapidly urbanising cities in the state (and the country). Thus, the argument that the city needs a separate Act
does not hold water. Urbanisation in Karnataka is skewed, led by the
primacy of Bengaluru.

The GBGB, 2024, seeks to split the BBMP into multiple corporations, cumulatively referred to as the Greater Bengaluru Area. 

Currently, the municipal area of 716 sq km is administered by the BBMP. The BDA plans for the metropolitan area of 1,270-odd sq km, including the municipal area. Notably, Bengaluru is amongst the first in the country to have a defined region—the Bengaluru metropolitan region—of 8,005 sq km that has been planned by the BMRDA.

The role of the GBA, especially in relation to the Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC), is perhaps the loudest contestation between the civil society and the government. The bill positions the Greater Bengaluru Authority as coordinating between the BBMP and parastatals like the BWSSB, Bescom, etc., and as a supervising body for the Greater Bengaluru Area, a role that is envisaged for the MPC by the CAA.

Additionally, there is a lack of clarity on the GBA’s jurisdiction. It emerges as an extra layer of governance (and presumably jurisdiction) that is larger than the corporations, yet not that of the Bengaluru metropolitan region. Whether this is coterminous with the Bengaluru metropolitan area is not clear. The bill vests planning powers with the GBA. In that case, what happens to the BDA?

Historically, planning and administration stood divided between the parastatals (urban development authority) and the elected government (municipality).

Premised on the principle of subsidiarity and democratic decentralisation, the CAA seeks to combine these two functions, and rightly so. The municipality (and not the MPC) is responsible for planning and management of the urban areas through its ward committees.

The CAA mandates the devolution of 18 functions to the municipalities, town planning being one of them.  

In this process, the CAA envisages a three-tier governance comprising the MPC-municipality-ward committee, with the third tier being the ward. This is vastly different from the three-tier governance structure pushed by the bill — GBA-multiple corporations-ward committees. The MPC is an elected body while the GBA is not.

Dysfunctional ward committees and MPC 

Currently, the BBMP is split into 198 wards with dysfunctional ward committees and an equally dysfunctional MPC. The latter is notified for the Bengaluru metropolitan area.

As per the CAA, the “The Metropolitan Planning Committee shall, in preparing the draft development plan, have regard to, (i) the plans prepared by local authorities in the metropolitan area; (ii) matters of common interest between the local authorities including coordinated spatial planning of the area, sharing of water and other physical and natural resources, the integrated development of infrastructure and environmental conservation”.

In its current jurisdiction, there is only one planning authority i.e. the BDA. Hence, the MPC will have no role to play in coordinating or consolidating plans from multiple authorities.

More importantly, the main role of an MPC is to lay out the frameworks for regional level concerns such as “sharing of water and other physical and natural resources, the integrated development of infrastructure and environmental conservation”.

Thus, the civil society’s claim (and echoed by the BBC) that the MPC is the plan-making body is flawed. To ensure that the MPC performs its function in spirit and in letter, its notification at the regional scale covering 8,006 sq km is the first corrective measure – a recommendation that was reiterated by the BBC, although it finds no mention in the bills cleared by the Assembly.

Notably, the BMRDA Act, 1985, is a strong Act – it provides for the BMRDA to be a coordinating agency in the region with the act of coordination to be facilitated through an inter-departmental Executive Committee (u/s 6). The BMRDA as the planning wing of the MPC is the way forward.

In this tug-of-war between the civil society on the one hand and the government and the BBC on the other, several critical requirements are forgotten.

At the minimum, the city requires a reimagined master plan derived from ward plans. It requires a functional MPC. All this requires an elected and empowered city government, which in turn requires the effective devolution of the 18 functions to the corporation(s), including urban planning.

(The writer is an urban and regional planner)