New Urban Governance Bill In B’luru Faces Flak

The “Silicon Valley” of India and the hub of startups and innovation labs is reeling under a serious problem of urban mismanagement. Once known as the Garden City, City of Lakes, and Pensioner’s Paradise, the city of Bengaluru now has become synonymous with traffic jams, urban floods, heaps of garbage and poor quality of roads.

This increasing urban mismanagement is now affecting the city’s brand value and investment opportunities. The city was rated as the “least liveable city” in India by the European Intelligence Unit in its Global Liveability Index 2022.

To fix the city’s broken urban governance, poor coordination among civic agencies and lack of political representation, the Karnataka government tabled the Greater Bengaluru Governance (GBG) Bill in the Karnataka legislative assembly in July. The bill proposes to split the current municipal corporation, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), into smaller councils which would be governed by the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) in a three-tier administrative system starting from ward committees.

The aim of this new legislative reform was to provide better governance and living conditions in the rapidly expanding city of Bengaluru. However, the bill is being criticised because of its inability to address proper political representation and lack of accountability and transparency.

Janaagraha, a Bengaluru-based not-for-profit institution working to transform the quality of life in India’s cities and towns, recently released a report highlighting the gaps in the newly tabled bill.

The bill is currently being reviewed by a 14-member legislative committee.

The background

The BBMP was established under the Karnataka Municipal Corporation Act, 1976 (KMC Act). In 2020, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike Act 2020 replaced the KMC Act, and since then, the BBMP is being governed under the BBMP Act, 2020.

The last elections for the BBMP were held in 2015 with its term ending in September 2020. Since 2020, the city of Bengaluru is being ruled by the state government, instead of the municipal corporation, and for every small local issue people have to approach the local MLA instead of corporator. The MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) usually represents a constituency at the state level in the legislative assembly and is responsible for state level matters, while a corporator represents a ward in a municipal corporation and is responsible for local governance. This shifting of responsibilities has led to the city resource allocation and administrative decisions being influenced disproportionately.

In 2015, the government of Karnataka led by Congress formed the BBMP Restructuring Committee to reimagine the governance and administration of fast-growing Bengaluru. The committee submitted its recommendation of splitting the municipal corporation into multiple corporations for better management.

Following political pressure from political parties BJP and the JD(S) and a court order to hold municipal elections, the recommendation could not be implemented. And the subsequent BJP-JD(S) coalition government rejected the recommendation. After coming back to power in 2023, the Congress government once again convened the BBMP Restructuring Committee which was renamed Brand Bengaluru Committee (BBC) in 2024.

The BBC was tasked to design a new and modern governance structure for Bengaluru to retain its preeminent position. Accordingly, the committee has prepared a draft bill. However, the Greater Bengaluru Governance (GBG) Bill, which was tabled in the Karnataka legislative assembly on July 23, 2024, does not incorporate many suggestions which are necessary for building a better Bengaluru and governing it more efficiently, say experts.

Delayed polls, lost governance

At present, the biggest reason behind Bengaluru’s faltering urban system is that the city has been running without a local government for over four years.

“The primary reason for Bengaluru’s current situation is the lack of a robust decentralised local governance framework, as envisaged under the constitution of India. Without timely elections, without metropolitan governance and without proper economic, social and cultural planning, Bengaluru is limited and hitting the limits of its growth. The state government must also fix the skewed development and actively develop other urban centres in the state on par with the capital to prevent migration of people from different cities into Bengaluru,” Santosh Nargund, head of civic participation at Janaagraha, said.

The delay in BBMP elections is attributed to a long pending exercise of ward delimitation, a process of fixing limits or boundaries of territorial constituencies, usually handled by the state election commission, taken up by the different governments in the states. Ironically, the new bill neither provides any solution to ward delimitation process, nor does it have provisions for mayoral post and timely corporation elections.

“The primary reason for delay in elections to BBMP is the random ward delimitation exercises undertaken by successive state governments at irregular intervals as well as fixation of ward reservations which are challenged in courts as being assigned with partisan considerations or unjustly by the party in power at the state level. This can be minimised if the powers of ward delimitation and reservation fixation are restored to the State Election Commission as mandated by the Constitution, and fixing a fixed interval of 10 years for undertaking the delimitation exercise. Unfortunately, neither of these provisions are incorporated in the GBG Bill tabled in the Assembly,” Nargund said.

Accountability and transparency

Janaagraha’s analysis also finds the GBG Bill does not address transparency and accountability in urban governance. Provisions for internal audits, ombudsman, and data disclosure are not taken into account in the new bill leaving a great possibility for corruption and service monopoly in the future.

“The tabled Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill, 2024 is quite weak in terms of transparency. According to Janaagraha’s analysis of the Bill against the ‘City-Systems’ framework, the Bill only gets a score of 2.36 on 10. The Bill does not have provisions for comprehensive civic data disclosures, or internal audits (including audits of HR process, performance management, and risk management among other internal processes and controls). The Bill also does not provide for Ombudsman for service-related issues and also addresses corruption and maladministration. An independent body like that of an Ombudsman ensures that citizens’ grievances are addressed more efficiently,” V.R. Vachana, head of municipal law and policy, Janaagraha, said.

Talking about political accountability, Vachana also highlighted the role of an empowered mayor with a five-year term to ensure a robust metropolitan governance structure, with a metropolitan authority to ensure unified and integrated governance and planning for a city with over 10 million population.

“Today, Bengaluru has a weak governance structure that does not respond to 21st-century challenges and opportunities. It does not have an empowered mayor with a five-year tenure, and suffers from severe fragmentation of governance with a myriad of civic agencies catering to the city with no integration or coordination. Globally well-run metropolitan cities are governed by an empowered metropolitan mayor, with decentralised governance structures,” Vachana said.

“It is also imperative that the citizens of Bengaluru are able to hold one political authority accountable in the city. The city hasn’t even had council elections since 2020 denying the democratic right of Bengalurians to be represented by an elected councillor,” she added.

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)