Passing the problem

Residents from a suburb of Bengaluru were in the news recently. They are trying to fix a fairly common problem -- sewage was being illegally dumped in a nearby open space, creating a stench and forming a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Who should have fixed the problem? The BBMP said it’s the responsibility of the BWSSB – they passed the problem elsewhere.

It’s the same situation everywhere, even if it comes in a different disguise. Five years ago, Church Street was completely redesigned under the controversial TenderSURE project. With the maintenance period of the contract over, no one seems ready to step forward and take on the responsibility of maintenance – the TenderSURE engineers blame the ward engineers, while the latter, in turn, plead ignorance.

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I know some neighbourhood community groups who are keen to revive their local lakes but have spent months, even years, just to find out the official custodian of the lake. They were sent from office to office -- Panchayat, Zilla Parishad, Fisheries Department, BBMP, BDA. Eventually, one helpful officer intervened. Should it really be such a hassle?

The bewildering array of overlapping functions and jurisdictions, boundaries, rules, and responsibilities, makes it difficult for any monitoring, tracking or performance assessment. Recently, a group of senior central and state government officers visited the Chikkanagamangala waste treatment plant. They were responding to complaints from nearby villages and residents and companies from Electronic City, who have been protesting about the ill-maintained site for months, without relief.

BBMP officials complain that the resolution to the problem lies with residents. People don’t segregate their waste, they say. This is true. Less than half of the many thousands of tonnes of waste that Bengaluru generates is segregated. Treatment plants cannot effectively deal with such large volumes of waste. But the committee determined that the plant is at fault, too. It was supposed to establish a functional leachate treatment plant two years back, in mid-2021. With no mechanisms to track and enforce such deadlines, the plant seems to have gone the way that our underpasses, flyovers, and metro stations have -- delayed, with no confirmation of when it will be operational.

Meanwhile, a path of ‘adjustment’ has been found, as it happens. The leachate is loaded into trucks and taken to a private facility. Or is it? The committee which visited the site noted that the trucks carrying the leachate did not have GPS trackers. The contaminated leachate, which contained toxic heavy metals, could be dumped anywhere -- there was no way to track this. Thus, waste that came from different parts of the city was concentrated and its super-toxic output then taken back in trucks and spread across the city. Lack of any clear chain of command, or accountability to time frames or tasks makes it very difficult to get a grip on the city and to enable good governance.

Policy and governance specialists call these the undesirable effects of polycentric governance. When there are multiple decision-making centres, at lower and higher levels, that can be a good thing -- for instance, if citizen groups seeking to protect a lake could approach multiple offices for help, that would definitely be useful. However, when there is no real intent to share information – or more importantly, to share power, for information is power – across different decision-making centres like the BBMP and the BWSSB, or the BDA and the Fisheries Department, then mala fide private actors can step in, exploiting the situation to their personal benefit. Instead of strengthening the local capacity of junior officials, at lower levels of governance, their capacity is further eroded by consolidating all decision-making at higher levels – in the name of efficiency. This leads to further chaos and confusion.

And so, the problem keeps going round, passed like one of those parcels you see in birthday games. Except, the music doesn’t stop. Even if it does, you won’t get the gift you seek -- of resolution.

(Harini Nagendra the Azim Premji University Prof prides herself on barking up all trees, right and wrong)