Hoping against hope: Will 2025 be the year of B'luru civic polls?

Bengaluru: This might just be the year when the nearly five-year wait for local body elections in Bengaluru finally ends. The last Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) elections were held on April 22, 2015, for 198 wards. The term of the corporators ended on the same date in 2020. However, elections could not be held due to the Covid pandemic. In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced a pre-emptive lockdown even before there was an outbreak, making polls impossible.

The pandemic proved to be a big hurdle as the country would suffer three waves of infections until 2022. Therefore, the November 2020 deadline for holding BBMP polls could not be met. Moreover, local body polls in Bengaluru weren’t prioritized as Assembly and Lok Sabha elections took precedence in 2023 and 2024 respectively. In August 2022, the BJP state government led by Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai delimited BBMP wards, increasing them from 198 to 243. Congress, then in Opposition, termed the exercise unscientific. They also bristled at the alleged concentration of 50 per cent of the wards reserved for women in their traditional strongholds. By May 2023, the Congress had come to power but didn’t address the issue of the local body polls right away.

In July 2023, the Karnataka High Court (HC) took cognizance of the issue and ordered fresh BBMP ward delimitation under 12 weeks since Congress opposed a similar exercise that had taken place under the BJP. In August 2023, the Congress government announced delimited BBMP wards, increasing them from 198 to 225. However, this was a mere formality since the Congress was looking to make wholesale changes to the Bengaluru local body structure.

BBMP obsolete: Cong- The Congress government held that the BBMP, which was created in 2008, is an obsolete body and doesn’t adequately address the city’s problems. Therefore in July 2024, Deputy CM DK Shivakumar tabled the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill (GBGB), which the Opposition wasn’t entirely happy with and it was therefore sent to a Joint House Committee for review.

Shivakumar said Bengaluru is too populous of a city and proposed several smaller city corporations carved out from the BBMP under the proposed law. The Bill would also carve out new departments within the proposed Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) namely town planning, solid waste management, engineering, finance, and law.

Disagreements emerge

Civil society criticisms against the Bill include the GBA strategic planning council being chaired by the Bengaluru Development Minister and not the Mayor of Greater Bengaluru, who would be elected by corporators. The argument is that the strategic planning council should be headed by elected representatives and not the Bengaluru Development Minister, who is merely handed the relevant portfolio. The purported diluting of the local body’s powers might also attract judicial scrutiny.