It is again an unrealistic budget as last year’s more than `9,000 crore budget remained unfulfilled. So the parks and trees promised at a hike in budget of 800 per cent will probably remain unrealised by the year end.
That no parking fees, which was promised several years ago, or congestion tax for entering traffic dense areas have been imposed shows a disinclination to do the easiest thing to ease traffic congestion instead of dreaming of expensive flyovers and expressways.
One hopes that the `700-crore allocation for solid waste management will not go towards transporting garbage out of the city but towards setting up at least one biomethanation plant in each of the 198 wards. They could also provide containerised push carts and auto tippers for collection of garbage and for colour-coded lidded containers at collection points to avoid manual handling and dumping of garbage on the ground.
More than `4,000 crore is going to be spent on road infrastructure, while the needs for the social infrastructure for anganwadis and primary schools, for instance, are expected to be fulfilled by the state government. One does not know how much of the budget is going to be spent for Bengaluru. This makes it difficult to analyse how much of the budget is going for physical infrastructure as against social infrastructure, which is a true measure of development.
In the absence of a land bank and money being set aside for acquiring land for social infrastructure, one does not know how the urban poor housing or the anganwadis will be set up.
A comprehensive water management system to make life in Bengaluru sustainable and to prevent the city from dying within the next five years is not visible in the budget.