Analyses

The issue of splitting up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) into smaller corporations, under some pretext or the other, has cropped up on a number of occasions in recent times. Only that, this time it's more than an academic exercise – a split definitely seems quite on the cards. What is, however, ironic in the ongoing babble over the pros and cons of a possible trifurcation of the BBMP is that many have changed opinions as times have changed. In January 2013, at a seminar on...

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) always gets it left, right and centre when it comes to governance. And, if good governance were to be about participatory democracy, the BBMP would be reckoned to be an abject failure. For over 20 years, various ruling dispensations in the state had virtually ignored the Constitution (74th Amendment) Act, 1992, which devolves power to basic units of governance in cities and towns called ward committees. The result was a lack of transparency in civic...

If financial health is to be taken as the bottomline, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has been lying comatose for a while, kept alive only by alternately conniving and obliging state governments irrespective of political ideologies. The BBMP is a financial disaster for many reasons, the prime among them being the tendency to live beyond its means, not mopping up enough revenue for itself, and, of course, rampant corruption at all levels of the corporation. It has only been doing...

The Karnataka Chief Minister has been insistent that the state capital has grown too big in numbers, and, is therefore unmanageable. It is this reason that Siddaramaiah has been propping up as the official explanation to split up the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). Bengaluru has definitely grown, and is a big mess in itself. The BBMP is currently the largest municipal corporation in the country with an area of 712.54 sq km under it. With a population of 8,443,675 according to the 2011...

It's now open season in Bengaluru after the Karnataka High Court ruling that the state government and the State Election Commission (SEC) will get a maximum of six months to hold elections for the reconstitution of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) which was dissolved last week. A Division Bench of the high court, comprising Chief Justice DH Waghela and Justice Ram Mohan Reddy, on Friday delivered the verdict while setting aside an earlier single-judge order asking the government and...

The very nature of power is such that more it devours you, the more you need it to survive. You can never have enough. Power is about control, and absolute power is about being in control of things without being answerable. As power keeps consuming you, the more you crave for absolute power. And absolute power, to borrow a mathematical analogy, tends towards infinity. In a political theatre, a dispensation can be in control of things by making use of the law and order machinery that is there at...

Few would dispute the argument that the Internet has empowered us considerably, especially in the last decade or so. But that freedom, call it digital empowerment if you may, will soon be snatched away by a cartel that masquerades as a trade body. This bloc, comprising telecom companies, presents a clear and present danger to our freedoms that, in the context, can be simply summarised as Net Neutrality. So, what’s up? The issue at hand is a consultation paper put out by the Telecom Regulatory...

The Bharatiya Janata Party's notable performance in the elections to Assam's urban local bodies (ULBs) held earlier this month has been described as a "sweep" by some, as a "surge" by certain others. The truth, as is often the case when hyperbole is used to describe electoral performances, is the casualty here. For, the truth lies elsewhere. The BJP's accomplishment was good, quite impressive. But winning less than 50 per cent of the seats and just about half of the ULBs can hardly be described...

The media has gone to town with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor, Raghuram Rajan's mention of Adolf Hitler and "strong" governments in his speech on 'Democracy, Inclusion, and Prosperity' at the DD Kosambi Ideas Festival held on February 20 in Goa. What many have been gloating about is that the RBI governor was essentially taking potshots at the Prime Minister with the insinuations. The two paragraphs that have been circulating on social media would certainly seem so, especially if one...

Too much hot air is being blown into Monday’s Supreme Court judgment clarifying that fatwas are not binding on Muslims. That’s possibly because there’s a new government in New Delhi that is led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and some people have a morbid tendency of contextualising issues. In fact, if anyone contextualised anything, it was the Supreme Court. The court ruled that fatwas are not illegal, but are also not legally binding on those against whom they are made. It was hardly a...