The Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party (BNP), a new political party which wants to contest the next BBMP polls, on Monday, September 20, highlighted flaws in the civic body’s much-celebrated decentralisation plan. In the first week of September, senior Karnataka IAS officer and BBMP Commissioner Gaurav Gupta had said that Rs 20 lakh each are to be spent for roads, pavements and borewells based on the ward committee’s recommendation. But a pan-city survey done by BNP has found that only 112 of 198 ward nodal officers as mentioned in the BBMP website confirmed they are nodal officers.
In the absence of an elected council of corporators due to a delimitation exercise that has been going on since September 2020, BBMP has appointed one officer per ward to act as nodal officers and chairman of ward committees.
Rishi Raghavan, Head of BNP Youth Wing, said, “The most important finding of this campaign is the disorganised manner in which the BBMP functions at the ward level. Many nodal officers are unreachable and there is lack of clarity on who the nodal officer is in quite a few cases which is a clear indication of a fundamental gap in the process of appointment itself.”
He added, “Ward Committee meetings are not happening in many wards and there is no system in place to even track if meetings are happening in each of the wards. Only 23% of the wards were confirmed to host a ward committee meeting. There is lack of awareness even among nodal officers about the Rs 60 lakh announcement which indicates a complete breakdown of communication within BBMP where the Commissioner seems to have announced to the public without even first communicating internally. “
He further said there was a lack of engagement by nodal officers with citizens in quite a few cases, which shows that there has been no thought-out process on how officials can engage with citizens to solicit inputs and finalise the budget.
The party said that their survey has revealed fundamental issues like lack of a process for even appointment of nodal officers, absence of a communication system within BBMP, announcements being done without any thought on implementation and a complete lack of accountability.