We often wonder what happens to the Rs 750 crores of rupees spent by the corporation every year just for garbage management. We wonder why the potholes appear so quickly and the storm water drains became garbage canals while the annual city budget is upwards of Rs9000 crores. We often see big announcements of projects that will make a remarkable improvement to our city, the garbage situation and some amazing technology to ‘quick fix’ the potholes etc etc. but most of these do not seem to translate to the city we experience every day.

Our city government, aka Corporation,  BBMP, is as opaque as it gets. Municipal corporation is the closest form of government to our daily lives, and yet, we have no clue what happens and why certain decisions are made and how the thousands of crores of our money is being spent. We are often surprised by what they do and almost never happy with the quality of the work.

The good news: we now have a unique opportunity to formally engage with local government and work alongside your local corporator and the BBMP engineer and health inspector and other departnments within your ward. This is a great opportunity to understand the challenges of running our city, help prioritize and monitor civic works and get residents to cooperate with waste segregation and other civic initiatives that benefit all of us.

Citizen participation is part and parcel of our democracy and has been built into our constitution at various levels, the ward committees at each ward level, comprising 10 residents of the ward, are a great way to bring governance to the grassroots  and make the decision making process transparent.  Unfortunately this has never been fully implemented due to a variety of reasons, but with the recent High Court ruling in the solid waste management case  that declared ‘Ward committees must be established for all 198 wards’ comes as a breath of fresh air and  brings hope that we, the people can formally engage with the system.

The theory of subsidiarity says that those that are closest to the problem are best equipped to handle it and find solutions, the ward committees will certainly have that advantage, members would know which roads need fixing and where the garbage piles up and which parks need what and can help the corporator and BBMP officers to prioritize projects and make best use of available budget. Let us use this opportunity to get civic minded responsible citizens into our ward committees.

Citizens for Bengaluru (CfB) calls upon all active citizens of Bengaluru, to apply to become members themselves, to nominate others that will add value to the committee and to spread the word.  We need 1980 people (10 per each of the 198 wards) to come forward and become ward committee members.

It won’t happen unless all of us do something about it. As a responsible citizens collective that fights for the city, we will do everything we can to create awareness about ward committees. There are hundreds of organizations with thousands of selfless citizens contributing to the city every day, and we are confident with organized effort, we can make the ward committees count this time around.

Use this form to nominate someone for ward committee: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfjrpKQJSoXM-s5EWay0hYk-QawOpjF_KW2slFoIfkOhr7BVA/viewform

For more information  https://www.facebook.com/groups/citizensforbengaluru

Join our telegram group : http://bit.ly/cfbtelegram