After the Bengaluru NavaNirmana Party (BNP) unveiled a website with details of ward-level projects in Bengaluru, residents in the Bellandur area of the city highlighted that only 120 out of 260 projects approved have been executed by the city's civic body. The website (https://bright.nammabnp.org/citizen-portal) has the details of all the projects across wards and the provision for citizens to download details of projects in their respective wards or sort the projects by year, by ward and other such categories.
Rupal Ralph, BNP leader and a resident of Bellandur, said, “We downloaded information from the BNP Citizen Portal and noticed that a total of 260 projects with a total value of Rs 111 crore were approved for Bellanduru ward in the last 5 years but only 120 have been executed. It is ridiculous that for a ward that is the sixth largest in the city, the budget allocation for roads is a measly Rs 3.2 crore.”
Another BNP member, Senthil Indiran, said that the residents were surprised when they found that Rs 2.3 crore was sanctioned for maintanence of facilities like parks and street lights in Bellandur.
“We were not given any information by the Corporator over the last 5 years despite repeated efforts and now to our disbelief we learn from the BNP Citizen Portal that an amount of Rs 2.3 crore has been sanctioned for maintenance of facilities like parks and street lights in Bellandur. However, there are many dark spots in the ward making it dangerous for pedestrians and drivers,” Senthil said.
BNP raised another issue highlighting a lack of fund allocation for solid waste management in Bellandur. The citizen portal showed that Rs 7.5 lakh was allocated in the year 2018-19 for solid waste management in Bellandur and only one of the 260 projects approved in Bellandur in the last five years belongs to the solid waste management category. "When compared with other wards, the average number of projects executed under SWM is 4.6. This amounts to an average expense of Rs 1.08 crore per ward till date. At Rs 7.5 lakh for itself, Bellandur lags far behind," a statement by BNP said.
The party also said that the brunt of sanitation woes in Bellandur is faced by migrant workers who live in temporary shanties without toilet facilities. While Rs 2.5 lakh was allocated for building community toilets by the Karnataka Rural Infrastructure Development Limited (KRIDL), an additional Rs 15 lakh for the construction of public toilets was not spent, BNP said in its statement.
It also highlighted cases of H1N1 in the office of SAP, a German software company located at RMZ Ecoworld on the Sarjapur-Marathahalli Outer Ring Road, in February this year.
Read: Did Rs 50 crore spent to rejuvenate Bellandur go down the drain? NGO writes to NGT