Much noise has been made about the City
growing haphazardly, but far from learning from the lessons of the past, the
present Government doesn’t seem to be any clearer on how to go about planning
for its future, as on the one hand it has established a Metropolitan Planning
Committee (MPC) covering all civic agencies for better co-ordination and
administration of its affairs, and on the other hand, the Bengaluru Development Authority (BDA) is in the process of drawing up a Master Plan 2035 on its own
for its holistic growth.
Civic activists are now accusing the
Government of lacking clarify in its goals. Says N. Mukund, Joint Secretary,Citizens’ Action Forum (CAF). “When the MPC has been constituted with elected
representatives as its Members and the Chief Minister himself as its Chairman,
the BDA cannot come out with a Master Plan of its own for the growth of the
City”. Noting that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is directly in charge of the
BDA, he wonders how he or District In-charge Minister, Ramalinga Reddy could
allow something like this to happen. “This shows how little they care for the growth of Bengaluru. The BDA cannot over ride the powers of the
MPC”, he insists.
Environmentalist
Le Saldanha too asserts that the Master Planning is no longer the BDA’s job. After
the creation of the MPC, the mandate for Master Planning has been passed on to
it. It is called the MPC for a very
simple reason - it is supposed to plan
for the Metropolis” he says, also wondering why the BDA has roped in a Dutch
Company to help it plan for the City’s future development. “Around 10 Officials
of the BDA are supposed to be taken on a foreign jaunt at the expense of the
Consultant to study “Best practices in Planning” abroad. It has not been explained why a non-Asian
City has been chosen as Bengaluru’s model,” he adds, declaring “The BDA has no
business planning our City any more. It
is our business to plan our city, and it is the duty of the MPC to assist us in
this process”. Recalling that the BDA
called for public consultation a few days ago through a newspaper advertisement
and later withdrew it, he claims this is an indicator of the Civic body’s lack
of competence for the job at hand. “The question is whether the BDA has the
power to engage in this exercise at all. Clearly, it does not, definitely nut after the MPC has been constituted
with a mandate to prepare, confirm and regulate plans of Bengaluru, once in
every five years”, he stresses. But ask
BDA Commissioner T. Sham Bhat and he says, there is no confusion in the matter,
as the Master Plan 2035 will be presented to the MPC for its approval before it
is implemented”. Meanwhile, the base map
for the Master Plan 2035 is getting ready.
Once it is ready, we will call for public consultations” he added.
The
BDA’s last Master Plan-2015 was itself not received very well, as it encouraged
a mixed zone concept and came out with zoning regulations. For many, it was the beginning of the end for
peace in their locality until then entirely residential neighbourhoods. “Scores
of hospitals cropped up in residential areas taking shelter under the mixed
zone concept and giving hell to the residents as parking became a huge problem
on the roads in these localities. The
revised Master Plan 2015 was a disaster and drew up a map for erratic and
hap-hazard growth of the city, snatching away the peace of residential
neighbourhoods”, grumbles Ravindranath Guru of the Banashankari 2nd
Stage Residents Welfare Association (RWA). Against this move, the members of the Banashankari RWA took legal action
to challenge the mixed zone concept, the High Court ordered the BDA to withdraw
it, but it made no amendments to the Master Plan-2015, he points out. “Now it
is getting ready to release another Planning document for development of the
city till the year 2035. What has the
Planning document incorporated? Has it
spoken about providing better water supply, transportation and housing ? If it has not, then what kind of a Planning
document it is? He also wonder as to why
the BDA is now preparing a Document planning for 20 years ahead, when it is a
practice to draw up plan document for every 10 years. Alleging that the civic authorities panders
to the builders’ lobby and turns a blind eye to private layouts that flout town
planning concepts, he says it cannot be trusted to work in the best interests
of the City.
A few days ago the BDA organized a public consultation meeting for its new Master Plan for the city. Predictably, there were so many protests and
complaints that it was forced to cancel the event. I say ‘predictably’ for three reasons,
- the first being that the
BDA does not know how to make Master Plans; there is no one in the BDA who has
done this task successfully and time & again the people have figured this
out. The city is full of problems owing
to this and people are now determined not to allow such glaring errors to be
repeated.
- secondly, the Master Planning is no
longer the BDA’s job. After the creation
of the Metropolitan Planning Committee (MPC), the mandate for it has been
passed on to that body. It is called MPC
because it is supposed to plan for the Metropolis.
- thirdly,
people are tired of being given some document or the other from the Government
and told that they must accept it. Instead, they have begun to remind the Government that it is their city
and they should have primary say in determining its future, which means that
the very first step should be to ask the citizens what they want before
planning for the city.
Rather
than a Master Plan from the BDA, what we need is a simple plan to close it and
establish a Bengaluru Infrastructure Development Authority (BIDA), which can
act as the primary anchor agency for all public infrastructure needs. That would atleast make one integrated entity
responsible for the over all physical appearance of the city.
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