The Karnataka government formally notified the creation of the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) on Tuesday, August 26, a new umbrella civic body chaired by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and co-chaired by Bengaluru Development Minister DK Shivakumar. From September 2, Bengaluru will be carved into five separate corporations. GBA will be the pan-city body responsible for coordinating between multiple corporations and parastatals.
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) will cease to exist as of September 2.
Bengaluru Central will be headquartered at Hudson Circle, Bengaluru North at Yelahanka, Bengaluru East at Mahadevapura, Bengaluru West at RR Nagar, and Bengaluru South at Jayanagar. Each corporation will have a commissioner, supported by a joint commissioner for revenue and two chief engineers overseeing lakes, roads, and stormwater drains. A delimitation commission is expected to be set up on September 3 to redraw ward boundaries, with the exercise to be completed by November 1, as per the government’s affidavit to the Supreme Court.
According to the government order, the GBA will have 75 members, bringing together ministers, MPs, MLAs, MLCs, and heads of Bengaluru’s parastatal agencies on a single platform for the first time. The Chief Commissioner of the BBMP, M Maheshwar Rao, has been appointed as Chief Commissioner and Member-Secretary of the GBA. The authority will also have a chief engineer and chief town planner, though notably no designated finance officer.
Among its ex officio members are Union Ministers Nirmala Sitharaman and Shobha Karandlaje, Bengaluru city MPs Tejasvi Surya and Dr CN Manjunath, Rajya Sabha members including Jairam Ramesh, Jaggesh, and Lehar Singh Soriya, as well as all 28 Bengaluru MLAs. Ministers from Bengaluru city, such as Krishna Byre Gowda, KJ George, Zameer Ahmed Khan, and Byrathi Suresh, will also be part of the authority. Once elections to the five new corporations are held, the elected mayors will automatically become members of the GBA. Bengaluru has not had an elected council since September 2020, when the BBMP council’s term ended.
The GBA will meet at least once every three months, with decisions taken by majority vote. An executive committee, headed by the Bengaluru Development Minister, will oversee day-to-day administration and finances, giving it significant functional powers.
In a first, all major parastatal agencies, including BDA, BWSSB, BESCOM, BMTC, BMRCL, BMLTA, DULT, City Police, and Fire and Emergency Services, will report to the GBA platform. The government has said the new structure is meant to eliminate the chronic lack of coordination between civic agencies that has hampered Bengaluru’s infrastructure and service delivery. However, some bodies such as the Rail Infrastructure Development Company (Karnataka), which is spearheading the suburban rail project, and Bengaluru Smart Infrastructure Ltd (B-SMILE), set up for mega infra projects, have not been given representation.
The original Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill, 2024, vested the GBA with administrative control over corporations, which was challenged by civic activists and opposition parties as unconstitutional. The 74th Constitutional Amendment provides for elected municipal corporations as the primary urban governance unit, and critics argued that the GBA undermined this. Following multiple PILs, the government amended the law, restricting the GBA’s powers to “coordination” functions, without overriding corporations.
Despite this,the opposition BJP has called the GBA “unconstitutional” and accused the Congress government of attempting to centralise power. Civic activists, too, have expressed concern that crucial portfolios such as finance and traffic management have no dedicated representation in the GBA.