The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) notified 67 ward committees on Tuesday, taking the total number to 198 wards. But, the 67 ward committees too have come under criticism for not including members from the civil society.
Srinivas Alavilli of Citizens for Bengaluru (CfB), said that even a cursory look at the ward committee lists reveal that multiple wards (for instance 125, 31, 79, 76, and 88) have husbands of ward councillors on the committees. “There is now incontrovertible proof that ward committees have been largely composed through nepotism,” he said.
The CfB has now demanded that the ward committees be cancelled, and that clear guidelines and criteria for selection of members be laid down with public consultation.
When the BBMP finally buckled down to notifying ward committees, citizens’ groups had mobilised themselves to be part of the initiative. They allege that instead of participatory governance, councillors themselves are proving to be the biggest hurdles in the last two weeks.
They cited the watered-down version of the clean-up marshals scheme. Ex-servicemen were supposed to be appointed as clean-up marshals, two per ward. They were empowered to undertake mustering of pourakarmikas and enforce segregation at source. However, when the council debated over the issue, councillors opposed the idea of empowered marshals overseeing garbage collection at the ward level, and allowed them to be deployed only as security at quarries and processing plants.
Audit halted
Days after this, the councillors again united to oppose a social audit of the pourakarmika rolls at the ward level and forced the BBMP to withdraw the order for social audit, senior BBMP officials said.
A senior official spearheading the initiative said the very idea of asking contractors to upload the details of pourakarmikas was to eliminate fakes and duplication through a social audit. “There are 32,000 records uploaded, while by estimates there should only be around 20,000 pourakarmikas. The councillors opposing a social audit speaks volumes of how these numbers came to be in the first place,” an activist said.
N.S. Mukunda, Citizens Action Forum, said though there were many citizen participation programmes planned at the city level, almost all of them fizzled out during implementation at the ward level, as councillors had many interests to guard and wanted no audit or oversee by citizens.
Mayor G. Padmavathi had also expressed helplessness regarding ward committees, as they were opposed by councillors, multiple times.
While the city has vibrant resident welfare associations and citizen movements, they have failed to become part of any formal structure at the grassroots level. Urban expert V. Ravichandar said the Bhagidar and Mohalla committee movements in Delhi were championed by Chief Ministers Sheila Dikshit and Arvind Kejriwal.
“This is missing in the city. We need a political leadership that champions participatory governance and makes councillors fall in line,” he said.