BENGALURU: Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda, who has repeatedly pulled up officials, on Friday at the second meeting of the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) Executive Committee, which brought together the heads of all major civic and infrastructure agencies to institutionalise coordinated planning and execution of urban development projects, said that it was not his nature to abandon a responsibility, referring to his ‘Bengaluru Development portfolio’ without doing justice to it.
Stating that without coordinated efforts among the various departments, he cannot bring any changes to Bengaluru and said: “It is not my nature to get off the horse that easily without doing justice to the responsibilities given”.
He said either he has to fall from the horse or the officials have to get along with him to improve Bengaluru. “We will keep trying until we can make whatever degree of improvement”, he said, adding that Bengalureans want better coordination.
The Executive Committee, constituted under the GBA Act, has been created to address one of Bengaluru’s most persistent governance challenges, the lack of coordination among multiple civic agencies responsible for roads, water supply, electricity, public transport, metro, suburban rail and urban infrastructure.
The minister said Bengaluru has, for decades, suffered because departments have worked independently, often resulting in duplication of work, repeated road cutting, avoidable expenditure of public funds and inconvenience to citizens.
“People have been asking for better coordination among civic agencies for over three decades. The Executive Committee has been established to provide an institutional and permanent solution to this long-standing problem,” Byre Gowda said.
The minister directed all participating departments to significantly improve coordination and jointly plan infrastructure works so that projects are executed efficiently without repeated disruption to public life.
He announced that coordination meetings, mandated once every two months under the GBA Act, would be convened more frequently whenever necessary to ensure continuous monitoring and quicker decision-making.
The minister said that many newly laid roads are often dug up within months because departments function without adequate information sharing, and it was decided to develop a unified GIS-based digital platform that will integrate information relating to roads, road history, utilities, streetlights and ongoing infrastructure works across departments. All civic agencies have been instructed to upload their proposed works and action plans onto the common platform before execution.
The platform will also enable citizens to report civic issues such as potholes and monitor the progress of corrective action, significantly improving transparency, accountability and coordination across departments.
He said the integrated platform is expected to minimise such instances through advance planning and inter-departmental coordination.
Officials were instructed to share project timelines well in advance so that utility works, road construction and other civic projects can be synchronised, reducing repeated excavation, inconvenience to citizens and wasteful expenditure.