BENGALURU: The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and Janaagraha, a non-profit organisation, on Wednesday jointly took up work on the ‘MyCityMyBudget’ for 2022-23. The initiative, started in 2015, is to facilitate and highlight citizens’ participation in the BBMP budget.
This year, the MyCityMyBudget campaign will focus on collecting inputs from citizens, with a special focus on parks, footpaths and public toilets. The ‘Budget Bus’ will traverse across the city and elicit opinions from people in different neighbourhoods of Bengaluru till March 15. Citizens can also log on to http://mycitymybudget.in and provide their inputs.
Janaagraha will collate all the inputs, analyse and present a report to BBMP for incorporation in the upcoming budget. The exercise by BBMP, has raised people’s expectations on increased allocation to the ward committees. Last year, for the first time, BBMP entrusted each of the 198 ward committees with Rs 60 lakh to make local decisions.
Srinivas Alavilli, head, civic participation, Janaagraha, said BBMP invites citizens to participate in preparing the city budget, which very few cities in India do. “More than 40 citizens’ groups have come together to make this happen.
This opened up new frontiers of citizen participation in many wards, where people collaborated with the BBMP to identify footpaths that needed to be fixed. This year, focus will continue to be on footpaths, public toilets and parks,” he said.
Palike Chief Commissioner Gaurav Gupta said, “Participatory budgeting initiatives such as MyCityMyBudget should become a nationwide movement. When citizens participate in budgets, they understand the processes as well as complexities. This will, in turn, help in prioritising how we can solve civic issues.”