BS Patil panel recommends splitting up BBMP can reduce corruption in Bengaluru

BENGALURU: The city's municipal area may be carved up into 10 or 20 distinct municipalities with a regional authority overseeing it, the BS Patil panel on restructuring of Bengaluru is going to tell the state government. The committee will submit its report to the government in June. The committee is working out a plan to make each ward committee responsible for functions that could be tackled at the local level, like garbage. The ward committee will be held accountable to an Area Sabha, which is similar to Gram Sabhas in rural areas.

The plan is that ward panels will report to a small municipality with a population of a million.The municipality will oversee functions like inter-ward roads and infrastructure. These civic bodies would report to a regional authority which will look after a wider area, and functions like transportation. "We feel that administering a smaller region will bring down corruption," member V Ravichander told ET. The committee's third member, former BBMP commissioner H Siddaiah, also felt smaller units would work much better than dividing the BBMP into two or three. BBMP currently caters to 85 million people as per the 2011 census, which, according to Siddaiah, is "way too much".

An academic paper by Sudhir Krishnaswamy and Mathew Idiculla of the Azim Premji University, which was submitted to the res tructuring committee, also says that the city should be divided into multiple small units.The committee appears to be inclined to accept this view. Corporators, however, have in general been telling the committee they would like to have the present structure headed by an additional chief secretary level officer and eight IAS officers heading each of the existing zones. The committee is currently doing activity mapping, which will define the role of each ward representative, corporator, MLA, MP and so on.