New political party unveils website with details of ward-level projects in Bengaluru

The Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party (BNP), a newly founded political party which has geared up to contest the upcoming city elections, has unveiled a unique portal having ward-wise details of all the projects approved and undertaken by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). Using this website, city residents can assess the progress and quality of work that is being taken up at the neighbourhood-level, promoting a sense of transparency. 

The website (https://bright.nammabnp.org/citizen-portal) has the details of all the projects across wards and the provision for citizens to download the details of projects in their respective wards or sort the projects by year, by ward and other such categories. The party said that with this website, citizens can be vigilant and make sure that the money allocated for the wards is spent on the right projects with full transparency.

Explaining the move, NA Srinivas Reddy, Governing Council Member of BNP and also a Ward Committee Member of Hagaduru Ward, said, “Citizens have been seeking transparency from the corporators and political parties for a long time. Despite a lot of citizen pressure and despite ward committees having been constituted, the Corporators and all existing political parties refuse to share any information about ward-level projects.”

Stressing on the importance of the initiative, Lalithamba BV, Core Working Group Member of BNP, said, “Transparency is very much the starting point of good governance. The existing corporators and political parties have been deliberately not sharing information about projects with citizens at the ward level for obvious reasons. This has facilitated and fostered rampant corruption, mismanagement and misappropriation of funds.”

This website launch comes after BNP earlier in September had highlighted the wide-scale use of a transparency exemption clause in executing civic works in the city. In what they called the ‘4(g) scam’, BNP pointed out that by blanket use of Section 4(g) of the Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurements (KTPP) Act, close to 50% of the city’s ward-level works were awarded to the Karnataka Rural Infrastructure Development Ltd (KRIDL), a government agency, without any tender process. While KRIDL is a government agency, it subcontracts the work to private players in an opaque manner and receives commissions ranging between 3% and 10% without providing any technical inputs, activists say.