More Bangalores, the better for us

The die is cast. The state government, by announcing the formation of a committee to decide how BBMP should be split, appears to have decided that the city has become too big to govern effectively. The irony is that five years ago, BBMP was formed by merging smaller cities and a number of villages around Central Bangalore, so that those areas could be better governed! We have come full circle now.
The decision to divide the city is right; it was a mistake to have formed BBMP in the first place. An already large and rapidly expanding urban conglomeration cannot be governed as a single city. Still, if we get it right this time, we can perhaps move on from the folly of the past.
There are two separate things to keep in mind while deciding what to do now - function and form. Fixing one without the other will not help.
Let's start with function. If the city is ungovernable, it is not because of its size alone. Without a planning body to coherently bring together the plans of BBMP, BWSSB, BMTC, Bescom and many other entities, whose work is vital to the city, we have been living in a region of endless chaos. It is no longer a joke that 'one agency lays the road, and the following morning another digs it up.' Such views are born of painful experience.
Recently, the Metropolitan Planning Committee was formed, with the assurance of creating a proper planning regime. This, along with ward committees that work, could make the city much better. But it took a high court order to get the state government to create the MPC, 22 years behind schedule. It was supposed to have been formed in 1992! And functioning ward committees remain elusive. The battle for development is fought in the trenches of such details.
Now to form. What should the new cities look like? We must understand the problem correctly. We are witnessing rapid growth in population and economic activity not only within BBMP limits, but also in panchayat areas immediately outside the city. Therefore, it is not only BBMP that must be reconstituted, but the entire BDA jurisdiction of 1,300 square km must be re-imagined. This 'peri-urban' region will bear the brunt of growth in the next two decades.
We must believe that small is beautiful. Simply dividing the area into two or three cities will not help. At this rate of growth, we will face the same problems in 10-15 years. A permanent solution requires faith in small cities, with not more than 2 or 2.5 million population. That means we must make at least four to five new cities.
We must get alignments of civic, state and parliamentary constituencies broadly right. The delimitation of state and general election constituencies is not in the hands of the state government, but we know what these boundaries are, and we can easily dovetail our plans into those. And while we are at it, the zonal and divisional jurisdictions of Bescom, BWSSB and BMTC must also be redrawn to align with the boundaries of the new cities.
In all this, we must not go back to the inequality of the past, where the core BMP was a large VIP city that received more attention and funds from the state government while the surrounding areas struggled. This time, we must anchor urban governance in a framework that imagines our cities in a more equal way. Keep in mind that many of the new cities that we carve out of Bangalore could be as big as Mysore or Hubli-Dharwad. With all that said, what's the magic number? I suggest to create 10 or more new cities spanning the entire BDA jurisdiction. If BBMP alone is reconstituted with the outlying areas being left as they are, we can conclude that half the battle will already be lost.
The areas inside BBMP can be grouped by assembly clusters - either three or four constituencies together forming a new city. The smaller assembly segments could be grouped in fours, and the larger ones in threes. And the areas outside BBMP but within BDA limits could be carved into a new kind of entity, whose governance recognizes that these areas are both urban and rural in different pockets.
Truly, the real challenge will be here, as this region is seeing the fastest growth. Incidentally, this will also mean that BDA itself needs to be re-thought. But first things first. We'll get to BDA in due course.
(The writer is an urban expert and a national council member of Loksatta)