Greater Bangalore : Budget by March

The Government may be relaxed about ringing in the municipal elections but not so about the city's budget. Greater Bangalore's maiden budget is all set to be unleashed soon.
The outlay for 2007-2008 has almost doubled from last year's Rs. 1867 crore and presently stands at Rs. 3000 crore, which could escalate or decrease till the budget day. The doubling is an obvious corollary - Bangalore has increased geographically from it's erstwhile 225 sq. km to 741 sq.km., the road length of greater Bangalore stands at 5000 km.

Explains BBMP special commissioner Gourav Gupta who has been inking details of the budget: "the budget will be presented in the last week of February or early March. We will not be imposing any new tax or cess. The thrust is of course on infrastructure enhancement in the peripheral areas."
The novelty in the budget presentation this year is that there is no council to present it to, traditionally the chairperson of the Taxation and Finance Committee presents the budget to the rest of the council including the MLAs.

BBMP officials are tight lipped about the modus operandi of presenting the budget.
They reckon it could be presented to the Urban Development Department as also all the officials of the news zones which were the seven CMCs a few months ago. Of the Rs 3000 crore, 20% has apparently been set aside for a category billed pro-urban poor activities. This includes physical work within slums and related localities, health infrastructure and income generation within slums.

Even as the budget is being finalised, there are teams of officials preparing master plans for different budgetary allocations including roads, flyovers, markets, BBMP hospitals and health centers, welfare activities.
Health is supposed to find significant allocations, especially in the realm of animal birth control programme as also measures to curtail man-beast encounters.

As for the task of upgrading the erstwhile CMCs and villages to "city" standards, check the task ahead - BWSSB lines are non-existent in these places. Which lays greater emphasis on sanitary and storm water drain management techniques