Governance

Recently, the Karnataka police found itself in a rather embarrassing situation after its DGP for internal security division AM Prasad, was conned by fraudsters of  Rs 2 lakh through vishing (fake call fraud). In mid-June this year, Assam legislator Utpal Dutta was defrauded Rs. 14 lakh from SBI bank by cyber criminals. Former IAS officer C V Ananda Bose lost Rs. 3 lakh, an ex-Income tax officer from Nagpur lost Rs. 68 lakh from his retirement fund. A 16-year old Delhiite hanged himself after losing Rs. 29,000 to a fraud from an e-linked account, while a 49-year-old homemaker from Bengaluru…

After having completed the first phase of the Telangana Land Records Updation Programme, targeted at improving documentation of rural land records, the state government will be initiating the next phase focused on covering urban land records. While the first phase has been hailed as a success, there have been some glaring omissions from the scope of the overall exercise. Thus, it would be a good idea to look into some of these deficiencies before initiating the next phase of updates, looking at urban land records. In November 2017, the Chief Minister of Telangana made a lengthy statement in the state…

The morning of October 29, 2018 saw chaos on the ITPL main road at Whitefield in Bengaluru, when the Gas Authority of India Ltd. (GAIL)  natural gas pipeline sprung a leak in front of Decathlon during BMRCL operations. The Bengaluru Traffic Police tweeted that the traffic had been diverted to accommodate the repair teams. By 10 am, it was announced by the GAIL DGM Operations, Senthil Kumar that the leak was plugged. While there was a lot of talk about the traffic situation it caused, the accident raises several questions about safety and more importantly about what lies below Bangalore’s…

On 11th October the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs notified a land pooling policy under the 2021 Master Plan for Delhi, to address the large scale housing gaps in Delhi. Through this policy, Delhi is set to get 17 lakh new affordable housing units, with a capacity to accommodate 76 lakh people. This policy signals a change in the Delhi Development Authority’s (DDA) model of land acquisition and development to a ‘land pooling model’, where the private sector and land owners are both partners in the development. However, while the policy is a first step, the release of land…

The summary revision of electoral rolls is underway in Tamil Nadu with the publication of the draft electoral roll in September. Those who will have completed 18 years as on January 1, 2019 can enroll themselves in the voter list and those who wish to make any changes or deletions may also do so during the revision period. The final voter list is to be published on January 4, 2019. If you are looking to add, change or delete yourself from the rolls, these are the steps to be followed. Just be quick, for the deadline is October 31st. Addition…

Swine Flu in Karnataka: 86 cases recorded in BBMP limits this year As many as 542 cases of Swine Flu have been registered so far in Karnataka and eight people had died, between January 2018 to October 17 2018. The toll continues to rise.  86 people were tested positive in BBMP limits, of which 54 cases were recorded in Bengaluru Urban, by the state's Health and Family Welfare Department. Most of the deceased patients were treated at Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases (RGICD) between August and October. The latest death reported is of a 58 year-old man from Bengaluru south…

Around the city, it's easy to see that a number of localities are struggling to manage their waste. Heaps of trash lie around on the sides of roads, and are cleared only occasionally. The BBMP has tried various things to stop this - from warning signs to pleas to decorating a few places hoping that people will be reluctant to dirty them. None of this has worked. Now comes a different explanation. Some communities want to bring back the old bins. Until about a decade ago, the municipality used to have bins at street corners and people would dump their…

It was a novel idea of providing services to students in the comfort of their homes: Apply for the BMTC bus pass online and have it delivered to you at home. However, the new service has run into rough weather as close to 70,000 bus pass applications remained unprocessed, forcing the students to turn up in large numbers at the KempeGowda  Terminal to collect their passes. With September 30th being the last day to avail these concession passes, and many unable to apply for it online because of glitches in procedure, many students queued up at the BMTC depot to…

There's a lot of talk about Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation's efficiency, price increase and making data-based decisions. People are asking the BMTC to stop fare hike. Before getting emotional about it all, let us go through the following points. Do we want to run BMTC as public sector transport organisation generating profit/Return on Investment (ROI) and to grow the network specifically focused on profits? Do we want to run BMTC as an employment-oriented social responsibility organisation to the public at large irrespective of its income/expenditure status? Do we want to run BMTC as a social responsibility for every citizen (Indian…

Citizens of Bengaluru were delighted to notice the tough action taken against the perpetrators of the city’s biggest eyesores - the polluting buntings and banners. These ugly and disfiguring hoardings used to obstruct straight vision and trigger off accidents by diverting motorists. For the past one month, thanks to the ultimatum by Karnataka High Court Chief Justice subsequent to a couple of PILs; the buntings were removed on a war footing. But now, for the past few days banners and buntings have started slowly popping up trampling the ban order. A few days back huge banners were being fixed across…