Bengaluru’s Ward One campaign will begin on November 1 across five city corporations, bringing road repairs, pothole filling, sanitation, footpath maintenance, street-light repairs and utility coordination under a ward-level plan, Greater Bengaluru Development Minister Krishna Byre Gowda said on Wednesday.
The campaign will select one ward from each division within the respective city corporation and identify its most urgent civic problems. Government agencies will work together to address the issues, with a coordination committee being formed for implementation, the minister said at a press conference.
The programme comes after rain damaged roads in several parts of the city. Along with repairing roads and junctions, the campaign will prioritise cleaning public areas, restoring kerbstones and slabs on footpaths, repairing covers over drainage chambers, fixing street lights and removing dry tree branches, small waste and mud heaps and construction debris.
The work will also include coordination with the Bangalore Electricity Supply Company for the relocation or repair of electricity poles and ring main units. The Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board will be involved in preventing water leaks and repairing or removing pipelines where necessary. The government aims to resolve as many identified problems as possible by the end of November, Byre Gowda said.
Ward-level officials will receive a checklist for sanitation and maintenance work. Ward assistant engineers, junior health inspectors and marshals will inspect roads using the checklist, record problems and identify the departments responsible for addressing them. The work will then be carried out in coordination with the relevant agencies, according to the minister.
The announcement also covered a restructuring of Bengaluru’s solid waste-management system. The city’s 27 Assembly constituencies have been divided into 33 packages. Work orders have been issued for five packages, one each in five Assembly constituencies, while letters of acceptance have been issued for three packages. The tender process for 10 packages has been completed and submitted for administrative approval, another 10 are at the bidding stage and three packages are before the courts, Byre Gowda said.
Each package contractor is expected to invest about ₹10 crore to organise and begin operations. Contractors had sought between one and two months to establish the system, and permission was granted, the minister said. The five packages with work orders are expected to begin operations in November.
The new waste-management packages will introduce new vehicles and GPS-based route operations. Existing vehicles, many of which are more than 15 years old, frequently require repairs and are not operating efficiently, Byre Gowda said. The system will gradually reduce the use of 500-kilogram small auto-tippers and introduce larger four-wheel vehicles with capacities of three to five tonnes.
The minister said the changes could raise daily waste-collection capacity from the current 5,200 tonnes to 9,000 tonnes. Annual spending on the city’s waste-management system is currently ₹597 crore and could rise to about ₹620 crore under the new tender, which includes new vehicles and technology, he said.
Byre Gowda rejected allegations that the tender process was not transparent, saying eligible contractors had been awarded contracts with estimates of five to six per cent under the prescribed rules. He also appealed to residents to cooperate with door-to-door collection by placing waste in buckets hung outside house gates or compound walls, rather than dumping it on roadsides or elsewhere.
