BMLTA Bill: A misdirected mobility plan, made in bad faith

Who doesn’t want the traffic problems of Bengaluru to be solved? On the one hand, there is clamour for widening roads, building flyovers and signal-free elevated corridors as the solutions to traffic congestion. On the other hand, there are voices pointing out that such projects have massively depleted the urban environment and greenery and that private vehicles are the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

In answer to these questions, the government has come up with the Bengaluru Metropolitan Land Transport Authority (BMLTA) Bill. But there has been no pre-legislative public consultation on this important Bill though its provisions will have such major consequences for the public.

As per the Bill, the BMLTA’s chief purpose is to prepare a Comprehensive Mobility Plan (CMP) to provide “safe, clean and efficient urban transport”. The emphasis in the Bill appears to be on bringing coordination between the multiplicity of institutions, such as BMRCL, BDA, BMTC, DULT, etc., and the independent legislations that they are bound by, causing overlap in responsibilities and functions. The Bill claims to integrate them to streamline and improve urban mobility. Is that all?

The Bill does mention in passing that the aim is “integration of social, economic, and spatial development policies and plans to advance sustainable urban transport”. But as several activists questioned during a recent webinar organised by the Bengaluru Bus Prayanikara Vedike (BBPV), what is the overall vision of the BMLTA? There is no commitment here to see ‘mobility’ as a right to access fundamental rights to livelihood, education, health, etc., that serve the widest sections of people, or to meet the Sustainable Development Goals or climate change goals. There is no commitment, for instance, on bringing the share of public transport to 70% or 83% as envisaged in many policy documents.

Activists bemoaned that such an articulation of vision and intent is missing from the Bill.

The Authority is supposed to prepare and implement policies on parking, non-motorised transport, multi-modal integration, etc. But will there be a mere ‘collation’ of these policies without ‘coherence’ between them and the overall goals? Will there be tokenistic cycle lanes encircling a few parks while an elevated corridor for private vehicles girds the entire city?

But the suspicion that the entire Bill is an eyewash is evident from a damning and curious provision under Section 22.3. While the whole purpose of BMLTA is supposed to be to prepare the CMP, it is not known by many that BMRCL has already prepared a CMP, under conditionalities imposed by the Union government in its MoU with BMRCL. The CMP has also been already approved by the state government but not many are aware of what it contains! Activists point out that BMRCL has no jurisdiction to prepare the CMP and it has prepared it without any reference to an approved Master Plan for the city or process.

To top it all, the Bill says further that prior to the constitution of the BMLTA, if a CMP has already been approved by the government, the BMLTA shall “if necessary” modify or revise such CMP. So, what is the purpose of BMLTA if a CMP has been prepared and approved already, which shall be modified only ‘if necessary’?

Even more baffling and damning is the fact that the Bill proposes under Section 22 that the Master Plan for the city should take into account the transport plan as already envisaged in the CMP! The Bill says that the ‘Planning Authority’ shall prepare the land-use plan by taking into consideration the already prepared CMP; that it (the Planning Authority) shall necessarily consult the BMLTA, duly consider and incorporate the suggestions given by the BMLTA in the draft of the Master Plan, and if such suggestions are not incorporated, provide a detailed explanation to BMLTA with the reasons for the same! That the Master Plan has been made subservient to the CMP under Section 22.3 is “legally unviable” and a sign of “global investors dictating policy”, say experts in the know of things.

And nowhere does the Bill mention which this “Planning Authority” is. Is it the BDA currently preparing the Master Plan unconstitutionally? A great fallacy in the entire Bill is that it nowhere recognises or even mentions that the Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) is the legitimate Planning Authority for preparing the Master Plan as per the 74th Constitutional Amendment.

The Bill does not mention the MPC at all, and has no view of how the BMLTA will function with or under the MPC. Activists pointed out that “the BMLTA has been placed at a superior level to constitutional bodies” -- the MPC and the municipal corporation. They emphasised that “the BMLTA needs to be an agency subordinate to the MPC and not an independent parastatal, as currently proposed, which overrides a constitutional entity”.

The Chief Minister is the chairperson and two other state ministers are members of BMLTA. This will lead to more concentration of power and decision-making at the state level, with little involvement from the BBMP council and the PRIs in the metropolitan area. The Bill does not also provide for a decentralised, bottom-up process involving people’s participation from the ward level and upward to shape the CMP.

As a first step, the demand is that the Bill should be withdrawn and a participatory visioning of the city through a wider public consultation process undertaken. The BMLTA’s structure, functions and processes should emerge from such a vision. But the Bill is available only in English and not in Kannada, disabling large sections from engaging with and critiquing the Bill’s provisions.

Ultimately, the BMLTA should be brought under the MPC and a new CMP prepared which is subservient to the Master Plan and not the other way around.

(The writer is Executive Trustee of CIVIC Bangalore)

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