The BBMP office.
Credit: DH Photo
Residents' welfare associations that have raised objections to the ward boundaries recently notified by the state government want to ensure that the BBMP also considered suggestions and objections shared online.
They feared that the civic body was only considering inputs received by post or in person when the BBMP’s announced that it received only 3,000 suggestions, 60 per cent of which came only from Yeshwantpur. They felt this was an indication that the Palike excluded suggestions received on its new website, created to display the boundaries and the map of the 225 wards.
A resident of HRBR Layout said that people in his area filed at least 300 objections, but they were not reflected in the data shared by the BBMP. Civic authorities said there were only three objections from residents of the Sarvagnanagar assembly constituency, to which HRBR Layout belongs.
“The BBMP has formed two wards by mixing the houses located in the first, second and third blocks of HRBR Layout. This is ridiculous. Mixing up villages, BDA layouts and revenue sites is a totally unscientific way of forming wards,” an RWA member said.
A resident of BTM Layout said civic officials should have made the Rajendra Nagar slum into a single ward instead of slicing it into three. “By doing this, the civic body has denied an opportunity for the people living in the slum to contest elections,” a resident of the slum said.
Exercise still under way: BBMP
A senior BBMP official said the civic body was, indeed, considering objections received on the website. “If multiple objections have similar content, we consider them as one complaint, instead of giving the total numbers,” he said, adding that the exercise of incorporating suggestions and complaints was still underway and the final map was not notified yet.
But residents have refused to buy this argument, pointing out that the BBMP was considering 1,800 objections from Yeshwantpur, although most of them have the same content.