BBMP

"BBMP wards are becoming unmanageable with a single commissioner and resources thinly divided," said Dr A Ravindra, Former Chief Secretary and Urban Affairs Advisor to the Chief Minister, Karnataka. He was delivering the key-note address at a seminar on ‘Reorganizing Bangalore into two or more Municipal Corporations'. The panelists at the seminar. Pic: Shamala Kittane The seminar was organised by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, Bangalore on January 19th and was attended by Chief Minister Jagadish Shettar, K. Dharmarajan (Chairman of Committee of Experts constituted by Govt. of Delhi to draft a new Delhi Municipal Corporation Law), D Venkatesh…

On Friday, 11th Jan 2013, a few of us were going for a birding trail, and we were waiting at the chai shop at Mantri Residency Apartments, on Bannerghatta Road, for a couple of others to arrive.Suddenly, in the pre-dawn dark, my friends (all young men) said there had been an accident, and rushed on about 10 yards ahead. Then one of them came back and told me that it was a girl who had been hit. A Tata Sumo driver had started the car and speeded up, and a young woman (about 19 or 20, I'd guess) had suddenly…

Subsequent to the judgement on the PIL on December 11th, 2012, the Chief Electoral Officer and BBMP organisations are undertaking intense cleansing activities of electoral rolls of the 27 constituencies of Bangalore Districts.A few steps:They have accepted close to 10 lakh applications for registration and have restored about 1 lakh voters to the rolls by verifying that the deletions were incorrect.They have identified about 12 lakh instances of errors and have corrected about 80% of them.About 65,000 duplicate records have been identified and deleted.More than 30,600 voters who shared their ID with some other voters are now allotted new IDs.Now,…

What can we do to make sure the kind of tragedy that we are witnessing in Ejipura does not come back to haunt us again and again? Nothing short of a comprehensive review of the housing market will suffice, because there is a fundamental problem - the cost of land is so high that too many people are priced out of home-buying. Here are some things we can explore to overcome that.1. Can the impact of 'land value' in housing projects be reduced?The biggest stumbling block in cities is the scarcity of good quality land. As a result, land prices are…

"The High Court order questions our credibility and our commitment to resolve issues in the city” -- so said Padmanabha Reddy, corporator of Ward 29 (Kacharakanahalli) at the special session of the BBMP Council on January 15th.  The agenda of the special session was to discuss the court directive ordering the government to form ward committees, and present the nominations to the ward committee to the Mayor. Though Reddy started his speech by offering full support to the formation of the ward committees, he ended up questioning, “10 members per ward will make it 1980 ward committee members -- how…

A BBMP demolition drive that began on Friday January 18th at Ejipura's EWS slum quarters, near Koramangala in south Bengaluru has driven up tensions and trauma. Around 200 people protested at BBMP head office on Saturday morning. The protesters included around 25 EWS quarters residents, along with residents from slums across the city who came to pledge support, most of them women. Around 30 Dalit organisations supported the protest. The quarters are a ramshackle bunch of tin-sheds. Demolition of a building. Pic: Navya P KYasmeen, 49, with her 4-year-old son, waiting outside their house with their belongings. Pic: Navya P…

The Indian Institute of Public Administration is holding a seminar on the reconstitution of the municipal area into two or more cities. If implemented, that would end the experiment of consolidating all the cities in the area into one single BBMP. I'm speaking at the event later this morning ... here's the gist of what I plan to say.In December 2005, when the government pushed through the creation of BBMP, Subbu Vincent and I wrote an editorial, titled "The sum of broken parts" arguing that this was a bad move. I predicted then that we would be forced to abandon…

As part of the Solid Waste Management PIL, the High Court asked BBMP to setup the ward committees to help monitor SWM contracts etc.The question of ward committees came up in the case when talking about decentralisation and audits on waste management, says Ajesh Kumar Shankar, lawyer for the petitioner. “Currently no one knows about who clears the waste in a street in a ward, how much is billed for it, who gets paid etc. There is a requirement that an NGO or RWA in the area should sign the bill; contractors get away by ‘creating’ some groups who sign…

I welcome and support the demand from various citizens groups, media and RWAs for transparency in nominations to the ward committees.The demand to constitute the ward committees is a long standing one and residents and other citizen groups have sought this for several years and this had been included in the recommendations of ABIDe chaired by then Chief Minister. It is fortunate that the High Court of Karnataka has intervened when requests from citizens had failed to move the Government and BBMP to act.So, now the BBMP must ensure transparent criteria in appointments of members to the committee and ensure…

Instead of letting corporators and garbage contractors decide on the garbage problem, public can get directly involved now. High Court has directed that each ward in the city should form a ward committee, which will include 10 residents of the ward and will be headed by the local corporator. The committees are supposed to be functioning by January 21st; you can approach your corporator and suggest that you or any competent person you know, be included in the committee. BBMP is holding a Council meeting on 15th, during which corporators will submit their nominations.The interim order came in a PIL…