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B-PAC, the mantra for all of city's problems?
Written By murali772 - 30 April, 2013
Bangalore governance Privatization Abide Citizen Reports citizen participation corporate sector BATF BPAC
B-PAC (Bangalore Political Action Committee) is all over town, the latest being for backing 14 select candidates for the May 5th Assembly elections.
The following excerpt from the ToI (for the full text, click here) explains the context, in this connection:
A candidate will be given Rs 5 lakh if he/she is the sole endorsed candidate in a constituency ; if there are two endorsed candidates in one constituency, they will get Rs 3 lakh each.
The educated middle class is apathetic about politics, and not interested in voting. For long, we were only discussing things, but now we've decided to act. We registered about 6 lakh new voters . Also, citizens were not contributing to campaigns - only illegal money was coming into politics. So we, through individual contributions, raised a Rs 1-crore corpus to support these candidates who believe in our agenda for Bangalore," Kiran Majumdar Shaw, managing trustee and president of B.PAC, told reporters while giving the example of President Obama's campaign.
I can't see anything wrong in this approach. In fact, everything seems right, and looks quite the way to go.
About a week before B-PAC's inaugural rally (from Kanteerva stadium to Freedom Park) was held, a mail reading as below (and, captioned "BPAC - ABIDE redux?") appeared in a yahoo-group, which I subscribe to, from a person whose opinions I generally value:
I've been getting a lot of email and personal requests to join and support BPAC. Am I the only one noting that this smells like Abide (or worse) all over again?
Particularly disturbing (to me) is their agenda for increasing citizen's participation in governance. Seems like they want to circumvent the democratic process by getting "experts" nominated into standing committees and the corporation, rather than strengthening the democratic process itself. It also suggests that they are for the inclusion of certain types of citizens in governance, but not others.
I know BPAC is personally reaching out to a lot of folks (including me, several of my cyclist friends, as well as my college alumni network). I personally declined a request to participate in their event next weekend at Freedom Park after reading through their agenda.
Wanted to hear what other people think about it. Predictably, the press is going all ga-ga over them.
But then, I asked myself "If the democratically elected leaders set up expert groups is it wrong? What should they do? Become experts in everything like our babus?", and left it that. In fact, I myself attended the inaugural show, which was I may add fairly impressive.
There have been other criticisms too. But, since they were largely from the usual 'corporate bashers', I generally ignored them.
Later, however, going through B-PAC's "Agenda for Bangalore", at Sl no 5, I noticed
"A comprehensive proposal for infrastructure development across all sectors has been drawn up by the Karnataka Information Technology and Communication (ICT) Group, which was presented to the government on January 8, 2013. BPAC will advocate that each piece of this proposal be taken up by the government and instituted over the next 10 years."
The question I have is why is this not made available on the web-site, and more importantly, why was this not presented to the public in an open forum, before being finalised. And, are the candidates who are being supported supposed to have committed themselves to pursuing this agenda?
Similar is the case with Janaagraha, which in the midst of all these goings on, organised a "conclave on Governance of City-Systems and the Challenges of Mobility" along-with the British deputy high commission. Though, Janaagraha is an invitee to the Traffic Advisory Committee (TAC), convened every alternate month by the Additional Commissioner, Traffic (and, chaired by none less than the City Police Commissioner, himself), the TAC doesn't appear to have been involved, nor was CiSTUP, nor Ms Jenny Pinto, whose PIL on poor pedestrian facilities has recently been admitted by the High Court (check here). Like-wise is the non-transparency of the dealings of their allied initiatives like B-TRAC, Tende-Sure, etc.
And, this is perhaps where they are going wrong, perceived as they are as elitist, and all working in their individual silos.
The first of such initiatives, viz the BATF (of S M Krishna ministry days - in fact, many members of the later 'avatars' were originally members of the BATF), too suffered from the similar perception problems. In quite a few of the forums that I am a part of, I have had to defend their critics, saying that they were essentially providing expert advice on how best to implement policy decisions taken by the elected bodies, taking extreme care to steer clear of interfering in policy making. I have even cited the example of how I withdrew from a sub-committee when the Chairman, Mr Nandan Nilekani, stated clearly that "opening up of the public bus transport services sector", something that I had been campaigning for (and continue to do so even now - check this), was a no-no as far as BATF is concerned, that being a policy matter.
BATF did quite well, if one were to ask me; but, of course, they could have done a lot better. The emphasis then was not as much on 'sustainability' as it is (rather, should be) now. The lack of vision from that perspective was their undoing, if one may say so.
Besides, the inevitability of their influencing policy decisions, as the nexus built up, was perhaps perceived by the aam aadmi (particularly in the rural areas) as not quite being in his interest, contributing in a way to the downfall of the S M Krishna government.
SMK government's fall meant the end of BATF too. But, the key members then came up with the idea of NURM, and sold it to the Manmohan Singh government, which had around then taken charge at the centre. Though, again a well-conceived and timely idea, its implementation across the states left a lot to be desired, rampant misuse becoming the order of the day (for examples in Bangalore, click here), with the originators unable to put in place the right checks and balances. This didn't much help the perception about their credibility, either.
Much later came ABIDE. Here again, the ill-conceived "Sarjapur road signal-free corridor" (check here) type schemes started raising suspicions about 'expert interventions', now even from generally well-off sections, who were perhaps beginning to see the larger sustainability picture.
All in all, B-PAC has got its task cut out. It would do well to study the learnings from the BATF, JNNURM, and ABIDE experiences.
PS: Corporates work through lobbying - that is, if they want things their way, they will work to change the law to suit them. But, largely, they work within the law. This is quite the scene in the USA. The down side is that you have as powerful lobbies such as the "gun lobby", about which even a Obama, is not able to do much yet, inspite of the recent spate of killings. On the other hand, however, you have a determined Preet Bharara nailing the all powerful Rajat Gupta, in a matter of months, as also the Boston bombers being nailed within hours, all through their well-oiled systems.
In 'hamara mahan Bharat', on the other hand, we are currently ruled by all kinds of mafia, the governments' own being the biggest, all openly flouting the laws, left, right and centre. Consequently, whilte collar criminals rarely get nailed, and the Malleswaram (Bangalore) bombing (which happened about simultaneously as the Boston incident) investigation is still in its preliminary stage.
As such, I would certainly welcome the participation by the experts from "Corporates", since I believe that in as vibrant a democracy as we have, it should not be difficult to keep any kind of lobbies in check. Mafia's, on the other hand, can easily make democracies dysfunctional.
Muralidhar Rao
COMMENTS
vmenon - 1 May, 2013 - 03:18
Have never really understood this corporate experts business.Can understand experts from academia, experts in a functional field.But coprorate experts.Truth be told,they are lobbys nothing more.
The real issue with the Batf/Abide/Bpacs of the world is a contradiction of sorts in thier operation.And at many fora have stated this openly.
The cry is for engagement of citizens/those outside of governmnet with descion making and that , that experts be consulted.
So far so good .But in all their own operations , plans .reccos there is not an iota of citizen consultations.In a way governmnet has to consult , but not them,.
Also these bodies tend to jump from reccomendatory bodies to actual implementers/deciosion making bodies in the shortest of times.
No doubt,if you analyse their plans , there will be a lots of merit.
But its wrong to use the bannner of democracy for these bodies.
vmenon
i
city could benefit from their expertise
murali772 - 1 May, 2013 - 06:07
@ VMenon - While appreciating the points made by you, there is no denying the fact that these 'corporate experts' are largely people with proven track records in managing their respective businesses. And, with management expertise very much lacking in our government organisations, I am sure the experts' engagement can contribute to filling up the gap there. As such, while there is a relevance to their engagement, the problem as you have rightly pointed out, and so also I, is the lack of transparency in the goings on.
BPAC's vision is confused, short term
das - 1 May, 2013 - 07:38
BPAC's vision for Bangalore says "We need world class infrastructure, if we are to have a world class city." This term has been liberally used by Abide/BATF/BPAC but nobody is clear about what it means. BPAC wants implementation of the Karnataka Information Communication Technology Group report . This report has a bunch of poorly thought out recommendations, full of contradictions like these.
1. It has 12 sections, of which 11 talk about improving the IT sector. No other industries or businesses are even mentioned. 11 sections for improving IT, 1 section for improving Bangalore.
2. Sections 12.3.1 says at least 60 % of people must be 'encouraged' to use public transport. Section 12.3.3 is all about building High speed travel corridors, elevated roads, flyovers (which encourages private transport).
The contradiction: There is NO mention anywhere in the document of discouraging private transport. So how do you enocurage people to use public transport if you provide more facilities for private automobiles instead of discouraging them ?
3. Section 12.3.2 mentions "Pedestrian overhead crossings with lifts and escalators".
The contradiction: To encourage walking you must have pedestrian crossings at grade. The report's recommendation actually gives primacy to automobiles.
4. Section 12.3.9 talks about segregation and recycling, and at the same time talks about incentivizing waste to energy (which means burning the waste) schemes.
The contradiction: You can either burn waste to generate energy or segregate and recycle it - you cannot do both. This presentation of mine on Waste to Energy vs. segregation + recycling clarifies the issue, and explains why waste to energy does not make sense. WTE plants use waste as fuel, and the experience worldwide has been that they discourage segregation and recycling.
5. Section 12.3.12 talks about Rapid tree plantation (without explaining what is 'rapid').
The contradiction: There is no mention of preserving the existing trees. Scemes like "replace each felled tree by 5 saplings" don't make sense because if you cut down a tree today and plant a sampling in its place, the latter will take 40 years to grow to the size of the original tree. Most readers of this post will be dead by then, and our children will see the benefit of the trees only in the latter part of their lives.
6. Section 12.3.16 asks for enhanced car parking space (notice it is only 'cars', never two-wheelers).
The contradiction: This encourages private transport, while sensible cities worldwide are reducing the parking space to discourage private transport.
7. Section 12.4 : Talks of a budget of Rs. 95,000 Cr. for high speed travel corridor to move private transport, Rs. 78,000 Cr. for public and non-motorized transport.
The contradiction: Lip service to public and non-motorized transport. It's like "I'm smoking 40 cigarettes a day to stop smoking" - meaningless.
These are topics that I am aware of. Doubtless people who know about other issues (like water resources) will have things to say about them.
s_yajaman - 1 May, 2013 - 07:53
Haven't we seen this stuff before? BATF and then ABIDE and now this. I just went through their website and here is my critique
a. Governance structure - there is never a perfect structure. What makes us so sure that the mayor will perform any better than the corporators? About 3 years back the corporator elections were touted as the missing link. Now all we have is another layer of corruption for the most part. Why will the state government let go of a cash cow and give autonomy to a mayor?
b. Citizen participation: citizens need to be involved, but largely with maintenance - the weakest link in any Indian set up. Have a responsive helpline where I can register a complaint about a broken pavement or a pothole. What is my qualification to suggest a flyover design? What is so unique about Indian cities that citizens need to design solutions?
c. Funding - is the problem with funding or with spending? BBMP must have blown up 1000s of crores on its hare brained signal free ideas but needs advertising money to put up a bus stop.
d.Accountability - no quarrel. The proof of the pudding is there for all to see in any case.
e. Strong infrastructure - I wish they would detail this out. Going by the past, it will mean more flyovers, signal free roads, elevated expressways.The city looks like a permanent war zone.
Why endorse two from the same consitituency
MaheshK - 3 May, 2013 - 09:52
How can B-PAC endorse two candidates from the same constituency, such as Malleswaram? B-PAC endorses BJP and Loksatta candidates. I dont get it. Two can't win an election.
May be the team B-PAC should have jumped into the fray. Its easy for armchair philosophy. Its whole different issue to contest an election.
Charu Sharma and Vani Ganapathy as team B-PAC? God help!
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