BENGALURU: Shane Watson won it for Chennai Super Kings over the weekend. What chances of his pyrotechnics working if he was sent out to bat with a hockey stick instead of a cricket bat? Zilch you would say. We have a similar situation with the clamour of a directly elected mayor as the one reform that will fix the city. In the current governance architecture, having a five year directly elected mayor for the BBMP is akin to sending the person out for a cricket match with a hockey stick. It won’t fix our woes unless we give the post more responsibility with authority to deliver.
For starters, BBMP is hardly lord and master of all that we care about in city living. For instance, water and sewerage, transport, electricity, master planning, policing, many water bodies, etc. is outside its ‘kingdom’. These are vassals of the State which further distorts the BBMP scope by budgeting BBMP type projects under its control. So, if we go and elect a five-year BBMP mayor in place of the currently hapless one-year titular, worshipful wonder, we are likely to have the same person give us lame excuses for the next five years.
This author is rooting for a five-year directly elected mayor. But this needs to be done after we create a three-tier city governance system with the wards, multiple Corporation and the mayor at the apex Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA). All the multiple State agencies will be integrated at the GBA level. Then we have a mayor who can plan, call the shots and deliver.
For this to happen, we need a new separate act for Bengaluru which allows for this three-tier architecture with the directly elected mayor in charge of the city.At one level this governance reform seems a pipe dream since the State will not want to let go control of the city coffers. But as we sink deeper into the abyss of an unliveable city, we will need to scramble around for workable solutions and this could be one of them. It has happened in the past with the opening of the economy in 1992. One wishes we could be proactive about doing the reform rather than be pushed into it due to adverse circumstances. Bengaluru has the chance to be the template for other mega cities. Are we up to it?