Articles by Ashwin Mahesh

For the first time, I feel that the long-sought Commuter Rail System is within reach. The state government appears willing to fund this in the Budget, and an initial round of money should help create the momentum for building out the solution in the next 3-4 years. And the national government too appears broadly ok with the plan. With this, the frustrating cycle of each waiting for the other to act will hopefully come to an end. Many people have been part of trying to make this happen, and if it does - as seems likely - we should count…

1) Think like it's 1947 A very large part of the deficits that we live with are because we do not have properly structured governance and accountability. We need to be reimagining these constantly, and adapting to current needs and realities. 2) Increase the number of problem solving people While it is important to pursue solutions, it's actually more important to create a society in which there are many problem solvers. That's what brings scale. 3) Help each other succeed Social enterprises almost always begin by trying to solve others' problems, but once their institutions take shape, they start to look…

There isn't any water left in river Cauvery to draw, for the use of ever-expanding city of Bengaluru. How do we, then, get water to drink? Here is a plan - creating another Cauvery for the city. Matthondu Cauvery Related ArticlesNo Cauvery water, no water problems. But that was thenWhy Cauvery Stage IV water has reached Bangalore, but not your home

"Better than nothing" is not progress. It's just better than nothing. If we set our metrics so low, we can never develop. Take the example of buses. The city needs about 13,000 to 15,000 buses to reach the kind of service levels that are seen in places with excellent bus service globally (1,250 buses per million of population). Also, each year, as the population grows, the fleet strength has to grow by about 200-300. That's the need. The actual fleet strength now is 6,500. And each year, 600 buses are scrapped, so these need to be replaced to keep the…

Who has the right to park on the street? For how long? And at what price? These are questions that every city faces, and universally they have come up with some practical ways of answering them. The core of these is that parking cannot be free everywhere. There may be areas where it does not need to be priced, but surely where there is high demand for parking space, it is important to price the use of public space by vehicles. Such pricing, it is assumed, will discipline people into using their vehicles less and wherever they continue to use…

Half the city of Bengaluru travels using 6,500 buses. The other half uses 55 lakh vehicles. This data points so obviously to what we should be doing, but unfortunately, we insist on spending enormous amounts of money supporting private transport, and less than one-tenth of it supporting public transport and sustainable options. The illogic of financing urban mobility is that it is easy to get 30,000 crores for a full Metro system, or 1,000 crores each year endlessly for road-building, but we struggle to get 50 crores a year for footpaths and refuse to spend 200 crores for a Bus…

Vittal Mallya Road was built about five years ago. When it was built, it was proposed as a higher order of design than the roads that BBMP usually builds. The difference consists of three key elements: a level and continuous footpath ducting of all utilities a concrete surface of uniform width Plus some nice things like better lighting, and a little vegetation. In Tender SURE, most of these became standard, and in BBMP we improved the design by re-doing the way the storm water drains are built. The road cost a lot of money to build. But it was a…

Some interesting twists in law come up in corruption cases, revealing technicalities that need to be addressed to clean up the system. This morning's news about Lokayukta-filed cases against former CM BSY is one such technicality. The cases were filed based on a CAG report, but in court it was argued (and accepted) that CAG reports are the exclusive property of the legislature, and no one else can take action based on them. I.e., when the CAG finds irregularities in actions of ministers, we must rely on the MLAs to take action against their own fellow legislators. In practice, given…

Whitefield. I know the very mention of that name is starting to remind people about all the things that are going wrong in that part of town. In my recent visits to that side too, I have been surprised by the degree to which the city has collapsed over there, and wondering what can be done to retrieve the situation. Rather than continue the litany of complaints, I thought I would put together the things that can be done to tackle the problem, initially focusing on roads and transport. A beeline of vehicles waiting on Varthur Main Road, near Kundalahalli…

As the rains continue to batter the city, it is easy to see that the infrastructure is of very poor quality. The potholes, the overflowing sewage, the flooding... these and many other observable things in the city remind us how shabby the quality of public works is. But this is only the apparent problem, the actual problem is deeper. Let's ask ourselves : why are the roads so bad? And then follow the answers steadily deeper to the root of the problem. The roads are bad because there is no check on their quality during the construction phase, and no…