A year into GBA, Bengaluru still awaits key governance institutions

A year after the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) came into effect, Bengaluru has five city corporations headed by separate commissioners, but much of the governance structure envisaged for the city is still incomplete.The corporations are grappling with shortage of staff, offices and funds, while key institutions meant to drive the city’s development and planning, such as the Economic Development Agency and the Bengaluru Metropolitan Planning Committee (BMPC), are far from becoming functional.The Greater Bengaluru Governance Act mandated an Economic Development Agency within a year of the GBA’s constitution to attract investment and promote employment in the Greater Bengaluru area, including through Public Private Partnerships. Yet, even as the corporations are looking for ways to strengthen their own revenue base, the agency meant to drive economic development at the metropolitan level is yet to be established.The BMPC, which was intended to bring together plans at different levels and prepare a development plan for the Bengaluru Metropolitan Area, has also remained non-functional. Meanwhile, with elections to the five corporations repeatedly postponed, ward committees, the institutional mechanism for citizen participation and monitoring of local works, are yet to be constituted.Experts said that, so far, the changes have largely been administrative, without the institutions needed to make the new system work. According to civic activist Kathyayini Chamaraj, the absence of elected local bodies has meant that the participatory mechanisms envisaged under the constitutional amendment have remained largely dysfunctional.Ms. Chamaraj argued that nodal officers were appointed in place of councillors to conduct informal ward committee meetings, but these could not serve the purpose of institutionalised citizen participation. The Area Sabhas, through which voters could participate in governance at the local level and which existed under the BBMP Act, 2020, have also been dropped from the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, she said.The absence of an elected local government has also affected metropolitan-level planning, Ms. Chamaraj said. “The BMPC was meant to collate plans prepared at the ward level and prepare a draft development plan for the Bengaluru Metropolitan Area. Instead, the planning function had effectively been centralised with the GBA.” The gaps in the planning system become more significant as the government begins work on a new GIS-based Comprehensive Master Plan for Greater Bengaluru with a long-term 2047 vision. The plan is only now moving forward, even as major infrastructure projects are being planned and taken up.Ashish Verma, convener of the IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab (IST Lab), said a comprehensive master plan would have ensured that these projects – elevated corridors, short tunnels, long tunnels, which are also causing a lot of damage to ecology and environment, would have been studied in totality and in a holistic planning framework before being finalised and tendered out.In the absence of such a framework, decisions were being taken ‘reactively‘ without first assessing what the project would actually solve and its impact on land use, land prices and accessibility, Mr. Verma argued.The issue also raises questions about the functioning of the Bengaluru Metropolitan Land Transport Authority (BMLTA), which was envisaged as a coordinating and scrutiny body for major transport projects. Recent changes to its framework, including provisions allowing deemed approval in certain cases, have raised concerns among urban experts about the extent of scrutiny available for large projects such as tunnel roads and elevated corridors. Meanwhile, the five corporations are themselves yet to acquire the administrative capacity needed to function effectively.Urbanist Ashwin Mahesh said that while the government had made administrative changes, the government had not followed through with the staffing and infrastructure required for them to function. He pointed to the recent changes with the BMLTA as an example of governance moving backwards rather than forwards, arguing that an institution that was supposed to strengthen coordination in transport planning had instead been made “toothless”. Mr. Mahesh said the city had effectively lost a year in implementing the changes people expected from the GBA. “Whatever you ask, they (GBA) are saying we are about to do it or we are in the process of doing it,” he said, pointing to pending ward offices, garbage tracking, road-quality improvements and other measures. He argued that the government could not rely entirely on an already understaffed bureaucracy to monitor every civic issue and needed to build systems through which public could participate in identifying and monitoring problems.(Series concludes)