Bengaluru, a city without a Council

BBMP Council. Credit: DH Photo

Can a city of over 1.3 crore people, perennially struggling to fix its myriad problems, afford to be without an elected city council for over 1.5 years? Uncertainty over the much-delayed Bruhath Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) elections has inevitably led to a huge vacuum in local governance, raising big questions on accountability and transparency.

The Palike has been without an elected Council since September 2020, implying there is no corporator to echo public needs and concerns. The pandemic did disrupt the process, but the new BBMP Act that increased the number of wards from 198 to 243 only complicated matters. The delimitation exercise awaits clearance from the apex court.

Accountability

Inevitably, accountability has been the first casualty. “In Kannada there is a saying ‘Madhuve Mane Kelasa’ which implies wedding time work, when everyone runs around but no one is responsible for anything. That’s the situation of governance in Bengaluru city,” notes Prithvi Reddy from Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

“We have potholes, dug-up roads, flooding of houses during rains, garbage lying all over the streets, but nobody to ask questions,” Prithvi points out. The party, he says, had filed 71 complaints against former corporators, contractors and the local MLAs on account of potholes and the huge corruption involved in roads.

But the police, he says, are unable to act since they say roads are not MLAs’ responsibility. “Right now there are no corporators. So we can’t hold anyone accountable for the day-to-day crisis that the people are facing in Bengaluru.”

Citizen deaths

This is actually leading to loss of citizen lives, reminds Tara Krishnaswamy, Cofounder, Citizens for Bengaluru (CfB). “You have deaths of citizens on a monthly basis directly attributable to potholes. It tells you sort of everything that is wrong with our city administration. No other big city is going through this problem. These are eminently fixable problems,” she elaborates.

The serious lack of accountability and transparency is a lived, everyday reality. “This lack of information on what works are to be prioritised and where the money is going, is no more visible than in the case of roads and potholes. There seems to be certainly some benefit to the State government to not have a third tier, because it then has the budgeting and the works directly under its control.”

So, why do political parties not apply pressure on the government to speed up the election process? Prithvi reads this as a reluctance by the ruling party to face the people since they have nothing much to show in terms of development. “During Covid and under the ongoing smart city projects, Bengaluru’s roads, drainage, garbage have been so bad,” he points out.

No urgency

But the other parties are not so keen on decentralising their power either. “I think they are all very comfortable without corporators because they don’t need to share the commission from various contracts. They can have all to themselves. So the other parties also don’t see enough of a crisis to call for elections.”

The lack of urgency in getting an elected Council in place echoes a general decline in the Palike’s powers. As Tara contends, BBMP does not have control over most of the devolved functions that a corporation should have. “It has no control over water, electricity and very little control over even roads.”

Ward-level governances, says Srikant Narasimhan from the Bengaluru Navanirman Party (BNP), is critical and assumes more importance than even the State and the national levels. “In the absence of elected representatives debating a good budget, taking up issues and solving them, the city continues to suffer more and more.”

Delimitation excuse

Delimitation has been an oft-cited excuse for the delay in holding elections. Srikant finds that as just a red herring. “I think the current state government is just afraid of facing the elections. If they give us the delimitation job to us, we will do that in one week’s time, a phenomenal and tremendous job within one month,” he says.

In the absence of an elected body, citizens had hoped the local ward committees could be a possible alternative. But as Tara reminds, “when there is no corporator, and when you don’t have a duly selected set of representatives that are the genuine voice of citizens, you cannot call them ward committees.”

The ground reality today is this: “We don’t have a systemic way of citizens sending a bottom up input or what is going on in the ward. So, at this point, despite deaths of citizens and court interventions, no conscience seem to be stirred in terms of making sure that democracy at this level is upheld. So it is a very scary situation.”

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