As much as Rs, 8344 crore was announced for Bengaluru’s development in the latest state Budget presented by Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa on March 5. Here’s the catch: It is a carry-over of the previous year’s Budget – with an outlay of Rs 8015 crore for Bengaluru –presented by then Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy. What’s more, it bears a new name. The former’s grants came under the `Chief Minister’s Nava Bengaluru Kriya Scheme’ while Yediyurappa’s allocations for Bengaluru comes under the `Chief Minister’s Nava Nagarottana Scheme’.

There are more similarities: From solid waste management to transport, mobility, water supply, sewage and lake rejuvenation, the programmes are the same. There is a point of order as well: Budgets have become top-down affairs with little or no say for the primary stakeholders – the citizens.

On the ground, that translates to the State government imposing long-term mega projects that show no signs of completion, while ward-level issues and aspirations find no place or allocation.

Srinivas Alavalli of Citizens for Bengaluru sums up this disconnect: “There is certainly some old wine in the new bottle and it will continue to be so as long as budgets are made in Vidhana Soudha instead of ward committees and BBMP council. People are still not the main stakeholders in the process of Budget-preparation. City budgets must be made by city sarkaara and that means BBMP must be empowered to truly run the city with funds and functions.”

This basic flaw, he hopes, could be rectified by the promise of a new legislation which was announced in the same Budget. “Will the mysterious Bengaluru legislation (new Municipal Corporation Act) do this? We have to wait and see,” he says.

Source: Govt of Karnataka Budgets 2019-20, 2020-21

V Ravichander, urban affairs expert, agrees that the new Municipal Corporation Act could be a game changer as reforms are paramount. He, however, remains cynical about the other announcements.

“Citizens want outcomes and budgets provide money estimates and so there is a disconnect in the process. And as there is not enough granularity and clarity, it becomes impossible to decipher how and where the money is spent. And so we are in a situation where we hear that hundreds and thousands of crores are being spent but garbage, traffic, roads and health remain serious problems,” he said.

Sapna Karim and Srikanth Viswanathan, senior experts at the Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy, are frustrated with the ‘Déjà vu’ they experience when they see Budget after Budget repeatedly asking for the same things.

“Every year we see the same things. We have a plan to tackle lakes, desilting, preventing flooding, filling gaps on stormwater drains, traffic and so on. And while we are doing this exercise year after year, astonishingly, we are still not being able to fix the problems. Citizens have a right to be angry if they cannot see measurable outcomes that improve their quality of life with the money being spent in their name, especially, when it is not done in a fixed, time-bound manner,” rued Sapna.

Little wonder that city budgets remain paper tigers and unrealised wishlists of citizens, the experts say, given that the governance structures and institutional mechanisms are weak.

The implementation of the Karnataka Municipalities Accounting and Budgeting Rules (KMABR), 2006, brought in fiscal discipline in Karnataka’s municipalities, as it mandated detailed disclosures in the form of city management reports and annual performance reports, besides the time-bound auditing and clearing of accounts by independent chartered accountants. But the same rules did not cover the agencies of Bengaluru, points out Viswanathan.

“These disclosures help explain the performance of these agencies in the previous year and for setting targets for the next. If Mysore and Tumakuru are doing it, why can’t Bengaluru do the same? Why can’t tax-paying citizens track the spending of the government by looking up the audited annual or quarterly accounts of Bengaluru’s agencies on their website in the same way you can see detailed audited reports for private companies like Infosys or WIPRO?” he asked.