Bengaluru: Greening and cleaning Bengaluru seems to be the mantra of the BBMP budget for the year 2017-18 presented in the city on Saturday.
Mechanical sweepers, marshals to ensure the city’s cleanliness and penalise those guilty of littering its public spaces, a special allocation of Rs 7 crore to provide two bins and one bag to all households, and centres to buy compost from people composting their wet waste in all 198 wards are some of the “cleaning Bengaluru” measures found in the budget.
As for greening the city, it talks of urban forestry, planting 10 lakh saplings, and creating 210 new parks in newly added areas and tree parks in BBMP schools and colleges.
Moving on to traffic, the budget promises a parking policy aimed at mopping up revenue by reintroducing on -road parking and creating multi-level parking facilities in unused markets.
In the offing also is a new law to govern a rapidly growing Bengaluru, and new by-laws for markets, advertisements and for laying of optic fibre cables.
But while the budget with its outlay of '9,241.05 crore has clearly been drawn up with an eye on the coming assembly polls, it has failed to come up with any substantial projects to ease the city’s traffic troubles in the long term or to fix its crumbling infrastructure.
And although Rs 750 crore has been allocated for solid waste management, the garbage menace has been barely addressed either. Interestingly, projects worth Rs 4,000 crore mentioned in the state budget have been replicated in the budget for the city.
