BENGALURU: After skipping ward committee meetings in April when the city and state were going to polls, BBMP wards hav restarted the process this month. However, only 20 wards held the meeting in the city on the first Saturday of this month, according to the NGO, Citizens for Bengaluru, which independently tracks the progress of the exercise.
“The ward committee meetings were held on Saturday at Shankar Matt, Hagadur, Singa Sandra, Dattatreya Temple, Radhakrishna Temple, Mangammana Palya, Binni Pete, Hoysala Nagar, HMT, Jayanaga (which is mayor Gangambike’s ward), HBR layout, Gottigere, Domlur, Banaswadi, Chikkala Sandra, CV Raman Nagar, Hemmigepura, Maruthi Seva Nagar, Ganganagar and Sanjayanagar,” said Vinay Kumar, a member of Citizens for Bengaluru.
Some wards such as Bellandur and Shanthinagar have promised to hold it later this month.
“If more citizens show up everywhere, it forces everyone to act. This will prove to be a massive change in bottom-up governance,” said Ashwin Sekhar, a resident of CV Raman Nagar.
However, several other citizens were not as lucky and complained that corporators and ward committee secretaries (usually the assistant executive engineer or assistant engineer) either did not respond to their calls or cited campaigning and code of conduct as a reason to remain absent once again.
“We have been trying to organise the committee meeting in our Shantalanagar ward for the last 10 days. One of the members said it cannot be held this month because of the code of conduct. We are not going to let this go as it is not applicable for this. We plan to meet the corporator soon to fix another date this month,” said Prabha Dev, a resident of the ward.