Bengaluru: A step forward or two steps backslide in urban governance?

In September 2025, the elections to the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike had been delayed by five years but any hopes of people electing their councillors – and having a say in the governance of their wards – had been dashed to the ground. The BBMP itself was dissolved that month. If the powers-that-be keep their word, then the voters of Bengaluru, one of the fastest growing cities in the world, may vote in civic elections after May 2026.^[1] But no one is sure when elections will be held and if the results will matter. The ground has decisively shifted; Bengaluru’s urban governance structure has changed.

The process to restructure it began in 2014 which, after a series of iterations, led to the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill which the Congress government moved in the state Assembly in 2024 and was finally passed in March last year – amid protests and Public Interest Litigations in the High Court. In the new three-tier structure, the BBMP will be the intermediate body split into five municipal corporations – north, south, east, west, central – with the central command and power vested in the Greater Bengaluru Authority to be headed by the chief minister of Karnataka and managed by a chief commissioner. 

At the third level will be ward committees which will form a municipal corporation; the councillor of the ward will be the chairperson of the committee. The committee will be responsible for preparing the ward development plan, ensuring proper utilisation of funds, and delivery of services. However, all its recommendations will be only advisory in nature. The mayors of each municipal corporation will find a seat in the GBA but they will be out-numbered by bureaucrats. This restructuring has brought the 17-18 parastatal agencies – which decide on transport, water supply, lakes renewal, and so on independent of the BBMP – under the GBA. 

In October last year, the Greater Bengaluru Authority rolled out an interim consolidated budget projection of ₹7,977.8 crore for the five corporations to maintain uninterrupted civic services during the transition period till March 2026. Most corporations are grappling with fund constraints, paying salaries, maintenance and pending bills.^[2]

The intent of the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act was to ostensibly decentralise the governance, improve the efficiency of civic services, and ensure citizens’ participation – a textbook case of fulfilling the 74th Constitutional Amendment. But, in spirit, the intentions have raised the old bogeys of urban governance, according to those who have taken the restructuring to the court. Four issues cause disquiet: Centralisation, even over-centralisation, of power under the state government; fragmenting the city’s urban governance architecture in the name of people’s participation; diminishing the value of people’s representation in the smaller municipal corporations; and weakening of the spirit of empowered local self-governance.

Centralisation built into structure, so will development decisions
In letter, the GBA will function as the coordinator and command of all the municipal corporations but, in spirit, its authority over the city’s planning, development agenda, and governance will be complete. It will be the planning authority for the entire Greater Bengaluru Area [Chapter III, Section 14 (1)], it will supervise and control all the parastatal agencies [Chapter III, Section 14 (2)], plan and execute major infrastructure projects from arterial roads and expressways to supply of electricity and water, and undertake any civic administrative function required. In today’s urban parlance, these constitute ‘development’. By design and structure then, people’s participation in the larger development agenda has been minimised.

Besides the chief ministers, cabinet ministers and chief of the parastatal agencies, the GBA will have bureaucrats and officers like the chief town planner, six sectoral expert committees, and so on. Essentially, it is run by the Karnataka government. The GBA also has the power to redraw the boundaries of any of the municipal corporations and merge any two or more corporations. 

This centralisation of the city’s governance – over-centralisation as many critics put it – runs counter to the 74th Amendment which envisaged urban local governance as comprising “vibrant democratic units of self-government.” Citizen groups, planners and urban scholars, and others have articulated these and other concerns in their protests and PILs.^[3]

The civic collective, Bengaluru Town Hall, termed the GBA law “unconstitutional” and “undemocratic”, and petitioned the High Court challenging the legal basis of the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act. Similar PILs by other groups sent out a strong signal to the state government that under the guise of streamlining and coordinating the governance of Bengaluru, now spread across 720.9 square kilometres, it was undermining the 74th Amendment. The outcome of these cases will determine when the voters of Bengaluru will vote. 

“The HC recognised the importance of the petitions and will hear it back-to-back in March,” said Sandeep Anirudhan, convenor of Bengaluru Town Hall. In his scathing take-down of the entire restructured framework, Prem Chandavarkar, well-known architect, academic and writer in Bengaluru, noted: “Bengaluru has been without an elected government for over five years, without a valid master plan for ten years, yet proposes to spend billions on mega projects that lack validation from either democratic oversight or planning frameworks. If the equivalent were to happen at the level of central government, there would have been a huge outcry that would have asserted we are being forced to suffer a murder of democracy, a collapse of governance.”^[4] 

Of the 70-odd members in the GBA, only five will be from the municipal corporations which will have elected members in their ward committees. Clearly, the GBA is a body with enormous powers, staffed by bureaucrats and the government of the day, and negligible representation of people  — but will determine how Bengaluru will develop, and for whom, in the next few decades.. In other words, over-centralisation of urban planning and governance. While the parastatal agencies – Bangalore Development Authority, Bangalore Metropolitan Development Authority, Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation, Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board, Bengaluru Lake Development Authority to name five – always took instructions from the state government, the presence of 198 elected councillors in the BBMP and their questions acted as the democratic checks-and-balances.

“It is too early to compare or form an opinion on the new governance framework, as the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) is still in its nascent stage and cannot be equated with BBMP, which has governed the city since 2007,” says Deepa Managooli, urban planner in the GBA. “While the five City Corporations function independently with their own budgets, they remain accountable to the apex body—GBA—which acts as a coordinating and supervising authority. Given Bengaluru’s rapidly growing urban challenges and influx of migrant population, governance demands constant and intensive monitoring. The restructuring into five corporations and 369 wards offers an opportunity to closely monitor local conditions and report issues through the respective corporation hierarchy.” 

While this sounds reassuring, the critique is that not only these committees but also the municipal corporations will have limited powers to make development plans, govern on a day-to-day basis, and be accountable to people in their neighbourhoods. Also, the governance on the ground would be fragmented. Roads, markets, water, air and lakes do not conform to ward boundaries or jurisdictions of five municipal corporations, critics of the GBA argue. Besides, any disagreement or confrontation between municipal corporations will have to be taken to the GBA for resolution. If the parastatal agencies were the “backdoor entry of the state government” into the city’s governance, as Chandavarkar put it, then the GBA is its brazen and near-complete control of the governance. 

People, their voice, their imagination
Existential questions emerge about the role of people as well as the role of their councillors, representation in the ward committees, and presence in the municipal corporations itself. Will people’s representation in this three-tier system become meaningless? It will essentially feature only in the bottom third layer of the power pyramid which, given the hierarchy with no representation at the top, is easy to dismiss. It will continue but, for all practical purposes, become meaningless. 

“The state formed the Metropolitan Planning Committee, required by the 74th Amendment, only on paper. Specialists such as urban planners, transport planners, ecologists, sociologists, economists, have not been appointed. Without elections and the elected representatives, the MPC cannot function,” said Anirudhan. In the GBA structure, the MPC has even less meaning and the city’s planning – the most basic of urban governance – will have hardly any representation. The broad nature and extent of Bengaluru’s development will be determined at the highest level, with little room for people’s participation.

The GBA structure overturns the constitutional purpose given by the 74th Amendment to urban local bodies. Its Article 243W states that “all municipalities would be empowered with such powers and responsibilities as may be necessary to enable them to function as effective institutions of self-government”.^[5] The GBA, according to Chandavarkar, also violates Article 243R which states that all members of the municipal government should be elected from that municipality with only three exceptions allowed. “The 74th Constitution Amendment stipulates that most seats in a municipality must be constituted by people directly elected from within it. The way the GBA is constituted, the overwhelming majority of the members do not satisfy this.” 

Whither, then, the voice of the people? It may have been hijacked lately in many cities including Bengaluru by uncouth majoritarianism and sickening communalism, but the space existed and offered hope that inclusive people can some day occupy it. The GBA top tier, where almost all the decision-making will come to pass, does not have this space; in the bottom tier, the space has no relevance. In all sense, the GBA appears like the “super authority” over elected bodies, notes this comment.^[6]

However, it is not only the representation or participation of people but the very imagination of the city that’s at stake, say critics. The reference of the second committee advising this architecture refers to “Brand Bengaluru” – a pet theme of influential private players that fantasise about the city in corporate parameters. A city is “radically different,” remarks Chandavarkar, “it must be an inclusive imagined political community, a public realm belonging to the entire public; power is meant to represent public interest and governance must be shaped by democratic oversight. In today’s discourse, corporate models are valorised as being more efficient compared to governmental bureaucracies but a democratic spatial entity cannot privilege efficiency as a sole virtue.”^[7]

Bengaluru, or Bangalore, was not always the city it is today. In 1949, two municipal boards — Bangalore City Municipality and Bangalore Civil and Military Station Municipality (Cantonment) – were merged to form the Bangalore City Corporation  with a jurisdiction of barely 69 square kilometres.^[8] After the IT boom propelled unprecedented expansion, the BBMP was formed in 2007 by merging eight surrounding City Municipal Councils, one Town Municipal Council and 110 villages. 

But the BBMP always had limited powers, says Anirudhan. “They could only build small roads, clean garbage, register births and deaths. It was called a city government but had none of the powers of a city government. The 17-20 parastatals run the city and they are answerable to none.” Except the government of the day. If the city must be imagined, and reimagined continually, as a socio-political space that gives people a sense of identity – Namma Bengaluru like Mi Mumbaikar – then this architecture of control by a powerful entity from above runs antithetical. 

There’s another aspect of lessons learned or not learned. Under the Congress government in 2011, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi was trifurcated but, in 2022, the BJP government reunified it merging the municipal corporations of North, South, and East Delhi into a single body again. Will the Bengaluru model go the Delhi way, especially if the party in power changes? 

“It’s too early to pass judgment,” says Srinivas Alavilli, an urban expert from Bengaluru. “Delhi’s corporations were split into three and that’s how it was left. There was no holding authority.” He points out that Bengaluru is three times bigger than Singapore, so managing is difficult. “The fractured governance of multiple agencies delivering different civic services is seen as a big problem; now, there is a chance to address each area’s needs.” 

“Decentralised waste management, collection, segregation is a great move. Your services including water, electricity, waste should be processed as close to the point of generation as possible, rather than transported over long distances,”says Viswanathan Sridhar, architect, In.sane labs, Chennai, comparing the GBA with Chennai’s system. Chennai has a partial decentralised administration with four zones – central, north, west and south – with each having a regional deputy commissioner and the set-up headed by the commissioner of the Greater Chennai Corporation. “The decisions of the RDCs are limited to a certain extent, beyond which the commissioner takes the call. Bangalore has gone a level up. I don’t see any concerns.”

Chandavarkar opines that the authority should have gone down to the ward committee and area sabha level. “If you track the versions of the Bill, the area sabha has been eliminated and the ward committee is not empowered. It doesn’t have the capacity to produce urban plans. So, the whole intent is to create centralisation in state government as opposed to the claim that breaking up into five municipalities allows greater decentralisation.”

An analysis by Bengaluru-based non-profit Janaagraha found major gaps in the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, rating it only 3.4 out of 10 and pointing out that although it makes some advances in municipal finance and staffing, it fails on planning and empowered political leadership.^[9]

The way forward
Bengaluru’s civic problems are infamous. The rapidly urbanised city grapples not only with congested roads, poor public transport, sanitation problems and illegal constructions but has lost many of its lakes and water bodies, green areas and trees. Known for its crawling traffic, Bengaluru ranked second on the most congested cities in the world in 2025; the average time to travel 10 kilometres^[10] is now 36 minutes and 9 seconds.^[11] “We don’t have governance. We don’t have planning. We are doomed. A city which had 70 percent green cover only five decades ago now has less than 2-3 percent,” laments Anirudhan, “There’s a shift in population from families to singles. It’s a huge shift, housing needs are different.” 

The last Master Plan was prepared in 2007. In December, the GBA began its first major exercise – to prepare a Comprehensive Master Plan for all the 709 square kilometres under its command.^[12] Those in favour of the GBA, like Managooli, advise patience; the new model will be smooth once it settles as every corporation has a mayor, councillor and a commissioner. “Earlier, one commissioner had to visit 10 roads and this would take 10 days. If there are five commissioners looking at two roads each, it’s faster,” she says.

The jury is out. Whether Bengaluru’s planning and governance improve depends on the functioning of the three-tier architecture, but the five municipal corporations and ward committees will not function till the elections are done, but calling for local elections is the prerogative of the state government. 

Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons