BENGALURU: Fourth time lucky, but partially. After being cancelled three consecutive times, the 12 standing committees of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) were finally formed on Saturday, but elections to select chairpersons of the committees will be held next week.BBMP and police officials kept their fingers crossed on Saturday morning hoping that elections would not be postponed yet again. They heaved a sigh of relief when nominations began to be filed from 8.30 am. There was high drama until announcement of committee members started around noon.
BJP’s Netra Pallavi was one of 15 corporators who had filed their nominations for the ward-level works committee. Since each committee can only have 11 members, MLA Satish Reddy and corporators N Nagaraju and Umesh Shetty withdrew their nominations, bringing the total to 12. Despite repeated requests Netra did not withdraw her nomination. Irked by this, senior Congress corporator Abdul Wajid requested the election committee to keep this aside and continue with the elections.
But senior BJP corporator Padmanabha Reddy said that it cannot be done. He also lost his cool and asked Netra to decide quickly. An angry Netra burst into tears and even tore up a set of papers with her only to withdraw her nomination.Arya Srinivas of the Hemmigepura ward withdrew from the race when 12 nominations were filed for the tax and finance committee. Similarly, Chetan K M (Kodigehalli) withdrew his nomination.
G Mohan Kumar (Kottigepalya), Abdul Wajid (Manorayanapalya) and Netra Narayan (Kavalbyrasandra), withdrew their nominations to be members of the appeal.Elections to the health, public works, education, social justice and market standing committees went on smoothly as there were 11 contenders for each. The accounts committee has one member short, as V Shanta (Singasandra) and V Shiva Prakash (Okalipuram) withdrew their nominations.