Five corporations and a city still searching for accountability

Bengaluru has completed its first year under the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA), and there is much to celebrate. The city now has five corporations, 369 wards and a combined civic bud get of Rs 20,216 crore. It also has zero elected corporators. If that sounds like a miinor detail, consider that the GBA was created precisely to deliver more participatory, responsive and accountable governance. The structure is ready. The money is ready. The websites are ready. The citizens, presumably, are expected to wait. The GBA was conceived to end Bengaluru's notorious fragmentation, bringing planning and coordination under one umbrella.Yet the city still has an impressive collection of agencies dealing with roads, water, transport, land and infrastructure.

The umbrella, it appears, has not eliminated the rain. Indeed, Bengaluru's governance now resembles a particularly ambitious group project: there are plenty of participants, an elaborate division of responsibilities and, when something goes wrong, an excellent opportunity to discover that somebody else was supposed to do it. The five corporations' first budgets totalled Rs 20,216 crore – about Rs 289 crore more than the erstwhile BBMP's previous outlay of Rs 19,927 crore. The arithmetic may have changed, but the citizen's favourite civic calculation remains the same: How many complaints does it take to get one pothole fixed? Even the government knows accountability needs work. It is now planning Sahay 3.0, an upgraded grievance system with complaint tracking, public dash boards, automated alerts and the ability to reopen unresolved complaints.

In other words, Bengaluru is developing a sophisticated digital system to ensure that citizens can more efficiently ask the government why nothing has happened. There is, however, one wonderfully simple solution to all this complexity: someone must own the outcome. A citizen should not need to know whether a road belongs to a corporation, a development authority, a transport agency or some other acronym before asking why it is broken. Nor should responsibility disappear into the administrative equivalent of Bengaluru traffic. The GBA promised integrated governance. Its real test is wheth er Bengaluru can finally achieve something more basic: integrated account ability. Otherwise, we may have succeeded in decentralising everything except responsibility.