From public policy to public's policy

How citizen action is changing the face of Bangalore

Sometimes, it takes a NASA scientist to fix an Indian city. Ashwin Mahesh an astronomer in the US and an expert in Antarctic clouds, is one such person. "The clouds disappeared and I returned to India," he says. Today, Mahesh is campaigning for a legislative assembly seat in Darasampallya, an urban slum in Bangalore, under the banner of the Lok Satta Party, a non-partisan people's movement. "Unless we get a reasonable degree of competence in our institutions, it is impractical to expect service delivery today," says Mahesh. "Inevitably, you come to the conclusion that unless politics is fixed, this won't happen."

So, that's what Mahesh is aspiring to do---win a legislative assembly seat under the banner of the relatively new kid on the political block. Here, he is accompanied by ten of his volunteers, many of whom are professionals and local businessmen. Ninety others are campaigning for him in other areas. One of them is P A Narayan, a Bangalorean who owns a pharmaceutical export business. "I felt helpless," he says, referring to the public pilfering of state coffers in the last five years and the steady crumbling of civic amenities in the city. "I was looking for someone I could connect with, someone with clean politics," he adds.

Mahesh walks door to door around the neighbourhood, handing out pamphlets with printed images of a bus, a garbage dump and a lake. He speaks to the slum's residents about how he convinced the transportation department to implement a far more efficient, directional bus service, removed trash from a notorious garbage dumping yard in a residential colony and cleaned up a filth-ridden lake. "We are building a better Bangalore for your children," he tells a vegetable cart vendor.

"Bangalore has more urban reformers per capita than any other city," jokes V Ravichandar, founder of consulting firm Feedback Consulting, who now focuses most of his energy on fomenting civic change in the city. There is a reason for this---by any measure, Bangalore is still an attractive place to live in. Young women sit in bars and sip beers, unperturbed by the spectre of gropers and molesters. Often, traffic waits in patient lines. Commuters don't seem to have their thumbs surgically attached to horns, as is the case with most Indian cities. In fact, Bangalore radiates a dynamic cosmopolitanism mixed with an old world charm that few India cities can match.

Yet, there's nothing charming about towering mounds of garbage that populate the street corners of even the most upmarket of its localities; or the grand 'signal-free' highway to the airport, now abandoned, its skeletal remains; or some of its most prominent roads comprehensively dug up and abandoned for about three years. "The city is not running, it simply exists," says Mahesh. No wonder Bangalore's residents, or all of Karnataka's, feel robbed. After all, they pay the highest taxes in the country, around 15 per cent, but don't seem to get anything in return.

This is not entirely the government's fault. Bangalore has experienced explosive growth, its population sky-rocketing from five million to about nine million in about a decade, putting incredible stress on the city's infrastructure. Nevertheless, the fact is Bangalore is being driven by its economy, rather than governance, say residents. Political parties no longer stand for anything and the government has apparently stopped becoming an agent for change. "Here, everyone is running unsuccessfully to fix yesterday's problem," says City Connect's Ravichandar.

The good part is this grim state of affairs has engendered a radical flowering of civic movements. After designing the property tax system for the city as part of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force, Ravichandar started City Connect in 2006, as a way of providing a platform for civic change. Janaagraha, launched by Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan, has tried to boost citizen participation in local government. One of its early initiatives was getting citizens to take part in the allocation of ward-level funds for local development. Bangalore Political Action Committee (BPAC), started by Mohandas Pai and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, among others, aims to enhance the roles citizens play in municipal life. Recently, BPAC was responsible for registering about 200,000 new voters in the city.

If at all you notice a perceptible difference in Bangalore traffic, it's thanks to an ingenious solution Mahesh devised for the city's traffic police. Using his tech background, Mahesh aggregated all possible traffic data, which included utilising ubiquitous street cameras already placed on traffic lights, as well as GPS systems in the city's buses. He then built a traffic management centre at the Ashok Nagar police station, using a software management system. "It's the best in the country," says Ravichandar. The control room has been able to triangulate traffic across 175 signals, streamline movement and generate Rs 50 crore in fines.

All of this would be second nature, say planning experts, if the government stopped working in silos. Here, transportation means the bus system versus the train system, versus autos. "The Metro sees its job as an engineering company not a mobility company," says Ravichandar. What is required is a planning department with a vision that is holistic, one that stops seeing the city through motorist-centric eyes.

If Bangalore is to survive the onslaught of rural migration and the services boom, it is imperative the region become a city, say urban planners. Clusters have to be formed in Mysore, Mangalore, Hubli and Dharwad, with connectivity and seamless transportation. Putting all your chips on Bangalore could prove disastrous. "Cities regenerate, but if job creation stagnates, everything could come tumbling down," Ravichandar says.

And, that is something that neither Bangalore nor Karnataka can afford.