Citizen groups of Bengaluru have rejected the city’s Revised Master Plan 2031 by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), saying it “lacked both vision and planning”.
According to Bangalore Mirror, citizens who attended the public hearing sessions held on Friday, said that the BDA refused to answer why the earlier master plan was not fruitful.
“During a BDA public hearing held on Friday at Ramamurthy Nagar the officials failed to come up with a proper answer about the implementation of the Master Plan 2015. It was evident that till date there is no proper implementation authority that would look into the execution of development works and hence we decided to boycott RMP 2031,” Ajit Sequeira, a member of Whitefield Rising told BM.
“We boycotted the RMP 2031 because it has bypassed the constitutionally created Bangalore Metropolitan Planning Committee and fixed a population projection in excess of two crore, which is illogical. The plans fail to address simple issues such as lack of basic amenities for the citizens and the huge compromise of green belts in the city as only 1 percent of the parks and green spaces has been preserved as against the proposed 10 percent,” said Tara Krisnaswamy, a member of Citizens for Bangalore.
Deccan Herald reported that the BDA’s master plan for development projects in the city for the next 15 years was unconstitutional with respect to the 4th Constitutional Amendment Act (74th CAA), the Karnataka Municipal Corporations (KMC) Act of 1976.
The Act states that regarding preparation of a ‘Draft Development Plan’ only a Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC) has the power to do so.
The MPC has to have two-thirds of elected representatives of the municipality/ panchayat of the area and the BDA commissioner can be the secretary of the MPC.
The Hindu had earlier reported that during the first such meeting on January 13 when citizen groups complained of the BDA’s ‘top-down’ approach to consultations.
"We were not given sufficient time to study the proposal before responding. The notification was given only a few days before the event, and holding one consultation per zone is not sufficient," Sridhar Pabbishetti, CEO, Namma Bengaluru Foundation told the newspaper.