The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) always gets it left, right and centre when it comes to governance. And, if good governance were to be about participatory democracy, the BBMP would be reckoned to be an abject failure. For over 20 years, various ruling dispensations in the state had virtually ignored the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992, which devolves power to basic units of governance in cities and towns called ward committees. The result was a lack of transparency in civic administration, and huge losses that accrued to the state exchequer on account of corruption.
The issue of ward committees, the ground-level unit of urban governance, has been surfacing in the public discourse in Bengaluru since the city three years ago literally sank under the very garbage that it generated daily. Worse, the situation worsened by the day, and political promises did not help. One of the solutions offered at the time was the setting up of ward committees – a constitutional obligation. After all, you needed democracy to work at the grassroots level to solve fundamental issues. But the BBMP remained callous to the idea and kept hedging, till it was hauled up by the Karnataka High Court.
The High Court in January 2013 directed the BBMP to constitute a 10-member ward committee headed by corporators in all 198 wards under the corporation within three days. The order of the division bench came in response to a number of public interest petitions (PILs) filed on the garbage mess in the city.
The court’s directive was essentially asking the BBMP and the state government to comply with the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992 which mandates the setting up of ward committees in municipalities with a population of three lakh or more. Karnataka already had the requisite provisions in its own laws, but had failed to abide by them. After the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) made it a mandatory for community participation in municipal corporations having a population of three lakh or more in order to receive funds, the state government brought in a new law to comply with JNNURM compulsions – the Karnataka Municipal Corporations (Amendment) Act, 2011, better known as the Community Participation Law, which was enacted in January 2011.
According to Section 13(H) of this Act, which replaced the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, 1976, the city corporations themselves, and not the state government, were required to set up ward committees. There should be a ward committee in each ward of every city corporation, with the corporator representing the ward being the chairperson of the panel. Ten other members would be nominated by the corporation, of whom at least two members should belong to the SC/ST categories. Besides, there should be least three female members, two members from resident welfare associations (RWAs) of the ward, and an officer designated by the corporation commissioner. There was a rider: the Act gave corporators the “veto power” in choosing members of the committee.
Nevertheless, ward committees are a mechanism built into the system so as to ensure compliance, and act as a watchdog. Besides ensuring proper utilisation of funds allotted under ward development schemes and supervising all programmes and schemes being implemented by the corporation, these committees are empowered to ensure timely collection of taxes, fees and other sums; ensure water supply maintenance in the ward and finalise location of new public taps and public wells; ensure sewerage system maintenance in the ward; ensure proper solid waste management and sanitation work in the ward and finalise location of new public sanitation units; ensure maintenance of street lighting in the ward and finalize location of new street lights; ensure maintenance of parks, open spaces, greening of area in the ward; ensure afforestation, and implementation of rain water harvesting schemes.
There can’t be a better mechanism to ensure way to ensure transparency in a democracy than a constitutionally-mandated role of the citizen as the watchdog.
The BBMP, meanwhile, grudgingly complied with the January 2013 court order. Members to the ward committees were appointed, but those could not work immediately since rules to make them functional were not framed. The Karnataka Municipal Corporations Draft Rules (Ward Committee) were finalised only in March 2014. It’s been just about a year, and things were just about beginning to fall in place when the state government, in its hurry to trifurcate the BBMP, dissolved the corporation.
The state government is yet to receive the final report of the three-member expert committee that was set up in September 2014 to look into the possible restructuring of the BBMP. Among the suggestions made by a number of institutions to this expert committee, two have laid considerable emphasis on the crucial role that ward committees have to play in urban governance—the Azim Premji University (APU) and CIVIC Bangalore (Citizens Voluntary Initiative for the City).
The APU remarked in its submission, “Since the problem with Bengaluru’s governance is in the way power is organised, we reject a restructuring of (the) BBMP based on purely administrative decentralization or a division of (the) BBMP within the current framework in which power is distributed. The underlying issue with a purely administrative decentralisation is the absence of any form of political accountability at the zonal or any other level to which administrative powers are proposed to be decentralised. If the problems faced by the peripheral areas are that of political distance from the centre, administrative restructuring is not likely to suffice.”
“The underlying problem with a division of BBMP not accompanied by political devolution or governance realignment is that it will merely result in the replication of problems currently faced by BBMP at a smaller scale. We are however not opposed to a division of BBMP if it also includes the rapid devolution of powers to the wards and the restructuring of governance structures that ensures the executive power of the mayor and the accountability of parastatal organs. Hence, having separate municipal corporations in place of the proposed zonal councils is a viable option if it is accompanied by political devolution and governance realignment in the manner we propose.”
CIVIC had specific suggestions. It argued that the current veto power of the councilor given to councilors on ward committees “should be removed as it makes the concept of people’s participation meaningless. This provision is not there in the laws of any other state.” The councilor can be allowed a casting vote when an equal number of votes are cast by ward committee members on any issue. CIVIC also called for ward committees to be asked to prepare a five-year ward vision plan for “economic development and social justice” as per a performance management system (PMS) based on human development and physical and social infrastructure outcomes at the ward level. “Targets need to be set and outcome indicators developed for measuring these. Monitoring and review need to be based on performance on those indicators,” the organisation suggested, among other things.
Any future split of the BBMP cannot afford to disregard the fact that it is not merely an issue of boundaries or population of Bengaluru – it is as much about institutional design and devolution of power, as is mandated by the Constitution of India.
