Hastily passed laws for city lack expert touch, say planners

BENGALURU:  In about a decade, Bengaluru city will have 42 assembly constituencies and five parliamentary constituencies, but a recent amendment to the BBMP Act does no justice to this exponential growth and several other critical areas of governance.  A group of MLAs led by chairman S Raghu finalised the BBMP Act 2020, which was passed by both Houses, but two urban planners, C R Ravindra and P G Shenoy, aver that the new Act is inadequate and needs to be revamped in respect of essential systemic provisions. 

They say the BBMP Act has outdated provisions which were part of the earlier KMC Act, which are “reproduced without improvement, particularly with key operational matters like property tax administration, disposal of public properties, waste management and regulation, planning for waste infrastructure, town and urban planning, environment infrastructure planning with regard to creation and maintenance of basic infrastructure’’.

They said Bengaluru needs to focus on digitising its property tax records and shift from annual rental value or unit area value to capital value system, based on the provisions of the Karnataka Stamp Act.   “Property tax is the backbone of internal finance of the BBMP as more than 80 per cent of revenue is through property BBMP should adopt a capital value system as is the practice in all other municipal corporations and even gram panchayats, and dispense with the unit area value system to determine the basis of annual taxable value,” Shenoy said. 

BBMP must implement Smart City guidelines within the framework of the Centre’s Digital India campaign, and invest on GIS and GPS platforms instead of incorporating it in waste management contracts, they said, pointing out that the Act has to make provision  for a Grievances Redressal Authority as a quasi-judicial authority. 

Separate chapter on planing
They termed as “dangerous” the disposal of BBMP properties by sale or auction. “The Act ought not to have made provision for disposal of assets by sale or auction of immovable properties and revenue earning estates as BBMP will lose valuable land,” they said.   

The BBMP Act should have a separate chapter on planning. The civic body must comply with complete network analysis and street pattern as brought out in the BDA’s master plans. Their study shows that poor waste management strategies have plagued the city for about 10 years, and BBMP must prepare a comprehensive strategy. The policy must work to achieve hundred per cent segregation of waste at source, and reduce the amount of waste going to landfills.

Ravindra and Shenoy said the BBMP must prepare detailed byelaws for heritage conservation and regulation. Besides, the Act has not provided for the improvement of water bodies and creation of lung spaces in the city, they said.