Articles by Ashwin Mahesh

For many years now, civil society has waged a long fight to get a proper Planning body instituted for Bangalore and other large cities. This is not only essential in order to coordinate different development activities in all sectors, but also required by the Constitution. Now, in responding to a PIL by C N Kumar, the government has put out the draft notification to create this body. Purely institutionally, it is a victory for all of us. JNNURM was supposed to get this done, but that was dodged by packing the Mission with pliable appointments and state governments that cooperated…

The Mayor feels IT industry has not done enough for Bengaluru. Sir, here are four things that IT can do for the city quickly. (a) Digitise the property records in the city, and host them online, so that everyone can see who is paying taxes, who is not, and how much. Likewise, digitise the records of government properties, spatially, and put them up online. (b) Digitise the records of all public works, including the history of works on each road, and put them up. (c) Digitise file movement in the BBMP, so that the routine work of the agency becomes…

About two years ago, I said to a few young people that 'if you do the following seven things EVERY WEEK without fail for the next FULL YEAR for only A FEW MINUTES A DAY, you'll be so successful you'll never have to worry too much about your career and other things. I'm not sure if any of them is trying it out, but this morning in some other context I was reminded of this. I call these the seven 4-letter words that guarantee success. Keep in mind, you must do this EVERY WEEK, no exceptions (health issues apart). You…

Problems in Bengaluru • There is no leadership of the city. Most of the important public services are in the hands of the State government, which is more concerned with its State-level priorities than with the city’s. Mayors serve short, uneventful terms. • There is hardly any planning. BDA does no more than zoning of areas for different uses, and even this is very poorly enforced. Other agencies plan-as-they-go, without any reference to a regional or city-level perspective. There is no commonality of jurisdiction among agencies, either. • The legal steps (outlined in the 74th Constitution Amendment Act, 1992) to…

ROADS AND TRANSPORT - 2013 - PROBLEMS • BBMP and BDA have been slow to develop Priority Corridors (BIG 10, Outer Ring Road). As a result, vehicles don’t choose to stay on arterial roads. • Road surface quality is extremely poor, and is made worse by inadequate planning for rains. • Speed of construction is ridiculously slow. BDA /BBMP /Metro all seem in slow mode. • Over-emphasis on vehicular movement. Pedestrians and cyclists suffer as a result. • Inadequate bus fleet, plus weak last mile connectivity. At least 1500 per year needed to be added. • TTMCs in wrong locations,…

With the Namma Railu project to connect Bengaluru to the surrounding towns moving forward, there is talk of 'land value capture' to finance it. I.e, can we find the money for this project (and others like it) by either giving additional FSI at a price to land-owners in the area, or by higher property taxes after the completion of the project? This is a standard financing technique that is used by many countries. But in Bangalore we have a dubious record on this front. We have arbitrarily increased FSI in some areas (e.g. near Metro stations) in violation of the…

BMTC is about to roll out the second generation of the Big10 system. In the first instance, the system shifted from destination orientation to direction orientation along the Big 10 arterial radials of the city (later expanded to 12). Then we added the BigCircle routes, and the cross-cutting routes of the K series. Now comes the next phase - a full trunk-and-feeder system to be deployed first on Hosur Road and then on the other arterials. Here are some of the key features (and I'll discuss each of them in detail in future posts).(a) Electronic City, Chandapura, and Attibele will be…

Freedom from garbage. The words have a nice ring to them, which is probably why the BBMP chose the name, KasaMuktha, for its new effort to manage waste in the city. Forced by the High Court to ensure that all solid waste is segregated at source in homes and offices, the municipality is struggling to come up with an alternative that is acceptable to citizens, and works well. Why? Simple. All our earlier efforts to 'manage' trash were built around landfills. Simply collect the trash from the citizens of Bangalore, and take it away to villages outside the city and…

When the alignment of around 50+ kms of the proposed road is more or less the same as NICE road, BDA has to construct only 60+ kms, not 110 kms as projected. Pic: wikimedia commons Why should the Peripheral Ring Road cost 4300 crores, and why should Japanese agency Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) be funding it? The toal length of the project is about 110 km, of which 50+ is unnecessary, because the western half of the road is more or less identical to the NICE Road which has already been built. So what we really need is road…

It was ironic to see the Chief Minister wonder on the Kasa Muktha programme, if BBMP should be split into smaller municipal bodies. Of course it should be. But the question should not be reduced to such a simplistic one. There is a whole lot more to consider. (a) If we say that the ideal city is of a certain size, say no more than 2.5 million, then we should ask ourselves what we will do in 2023, when Bangalore's population is higher by another 2.5 million people. (b) What about fast urbanising areas outside BBMP? Why do we continue…