Reconstructing Humpty Dumpty

Various ministers in the government have been indicating from time to time that they plan to divide BBMP into smaller cities, to make the region more governable. This is a complete U-turn from some years ago, when several smaller cities in the region were combined together to form BBMP, because it was thought that would make the region easier to govern.

In reality, both amalgamation and division are political ideas, and have nothing to do with governance. Recall what happened in 2006. The municipal councils of the erstwhile BMP and the surrounding municipal bodies were dissolved at the end of their terms, and no new election was held for those local bodies, because the government planned to do away with them all and constitute one big entity, namely the BBMP.

Using this as a pretense, for almost four years up to March 2010, no civic elections were held. MLAs loved this as it allowed them to rule the roost, in the absence of corporators.
Almost the same thing is about to play out in reverse. If the state government is really serious about reconstituting BBMP as smaller cities, it should begin that exercise now.

Any such decision would need time to be implemented. The boundaries of the new cities need to be fixed, their internal ward boundaries determined, and reservation of wards for different categories of contestants needs to be finalised.

The government should either complete these steps by March 2015 so that the elections to the local bodies can be held on time, or it should continue with the BBMP itself for another term, or until the new municipal bodies are ready to take shape. Dissolving the BBMP without simultaneously constituting the replacements would be unethical.

The city is adding 2,50,000 people every year, and there is also a lot of new growth in areas immediately outside BBMP limits. Therefore, rather than simply looking at how the BBMP should be reconfigured, the government should come up with a policy on municipalising new areas, and redrawing municipal boundaries periodically according to this policy. Otherwise, we will end up with more rounds of ad hoc steps, which are mindlessly applied, reversed, and so on.

Ideally, each municipal body should have no more than 1.5 to 2 million people. By this measure, BBMP and its surrounding areas should be divided into five to seven smaller cities, and there should be a way of redrawing boundaries every ten years. More importantly, this exercise should be carried out by a non-partisan Delimitation and Municipalisation Commission, or the Election Commission itself as required by the constitution, instead of by the state government.

We should also understand one other thing. There is no point in going back to a number of smaller cities if, in the process, we end up making the core city alone important from an administrative viewpoint, and treating all the surrounding ones as second-class.

Ashwin Mahesh is the president of Loksatta Party, Karnataka.