October 22, 2025
BENGALURU – Rage is a common emotion on the roads and footpaths of Bengaluru.
The Silicon Valley of India has been an administrative disaster for years, with companies such as digital trucking giant BlackBuck even threatening to leave the city over stubborn potholes that make it impossible for employees to get to work on time.
In a weary post with a heartbreak emoji on X in September, BlackBuck co-founder Rajesh Yabaji announced that after nine years, his company was moving out of Bengaluru’s Outer Ring Road – home to over 500 technology companies – citing what he called the “lowest intent” to fix congestion and crumbling infrastructure.
Two heavyweight entrepreneurs, Aarin Capital chief Mohandas Pai and Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, responded, calling it “a big failure of governance” that needs “emergency measures”.
Bengaluru’s 14 million residents spend half their day stuck in gridlocked traffic. The city ranks third-worst globally in a traffic index compiled by Dutch navigation service TomTom.
Every summer, the water runs dry. Every monsoon, the city’s poshest suburbs flood. Lakes have frothed over with toxic sewage. Garbage piles up for days.
Unchecked real estate development blocks stormwater drains, fells trees and builds over lakes with nary a permission.
Even the charms of the city’s pleasant weather and high-quality beer have been wearing thin for a decade now.
“What’s the single biggest problem of Bengaluru? Too many agencies working in silos, so that one lays a road and the other digs it up to lay cables the very next day,” said urban activist Srinivas Alavilli, who works on Sustainable Cities and Transport at WRI India, a research organisation.
The blame for Bengaluru’s dysfunction lies in the semi-independent functioning of at least a dozen state government-controlled organisations or parastatals, in addition to the city corporation. These agencies handling water and electricity supplies, sewage management, garbage disposal, buses, metros and roads chase their own plans, rarely talking to each other.
On the ground, this results in new metro stations that are not connected to bus routes, residential layouts drawn without clear drainage plans, and traffic police scrambling to handle midday gridlocks caused by unannounced road repairs.
While these urban woes are not unique to Bengaluru, the IT hub’s economic significance has made the search for a solution particularly urgent.
The power of five
Bengaluru is now experimenting with a new governance structure.
In 2025, it broke up the overstretched city corporation into five mini or zonal corporations, all under a coordinating agency called the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA), chaired by the chief minister of Karnataka state.
It is the first Indian city to do so.
Each of the five zonal corporations will be run by a bureaucrat and a mayor.
The transition will be complete once local elections are held in early 2026 for 368 ward corporators, who will in turn choose each zone’s mayor. A corporator is an elected member of a municipal corporation.
Bengaluru is trying out “political decentralisation and administrative centralisation”, explained urbanist V. Ravichandar, one of the architects of the GBA, which has been in the works since 2014.
While this approach ends its residents’ hope for an enigmatic mayor – like Mr Sadiq Khan of London or Ms Anne Hidalgo of Paris – to magically fix Bengaluru’s problems, Mr Ravichandar is betting on competition between the mini corporations to drive reform.
If the new governance model works, Bengaluru’s experiment might turn out to be a blueprint for other fast-expanding Indian metropolises, where at least half the country’s 1.4 billion people live today.
Cities contribute the vast majority of direct taxes and at least 60 per cent of India’s gross domestic product. However, the city authorities largely depend on state and central government funds, and city mayors are mere figureheads.
More coordination
“The formation of the GBA addresses the problem of lack of communication among different agencies because it will manage all the parastatals,” Mr Alavilli told The Straits Times.
Under a chief commissioner and executive committee, the GBA will centrally coordinate the various water, sewage, road, garbage and electricity agencies that often work at cross purposes.
This could lead to a comprehensive climate action plan and a land transport master plan that integrates buses, metros, private transport and walking – initiatives that Bengaluru residents have been starved of.
Meanwhile, the five zonal corporations could make administration more manageable in a city whose population has grown by 50 per cent in a decade.
The GBA’s funding model, still under development, will be a mix of state and central allocations that will be equitably distributed to the five corporations. The corporations will collect their own revenue, get finance disbursements as determined by state and central finance commissions, and receive state grants based on their revenue and capital needs.
Having five smaller corporations means that each one has individual budgets. Each corporation would now be motivated to maximise revenue collection through property tax, parking charges or advertisements – “and they get to keep all of it, not give it to a central corporation (as they had to before)”, said Mr Alavilli.
He added that although the new structure means more layers of bureaucracy, having smaller, localised corporations could make the government more accessible to residents and accountable to them directly and through the elected ward corporators.
Legal and accountability concerns
For some, however, there is a flaw in the design: On top of the pyramid is the state chief minister, who is also the GBA chairman. The vice-chairman is the deputy chief minister, who also happens to be the minister for Bengaluru.
Not all civic activists believe this structure is effective – or even legal.
Mr Vijayan Menon, president of Citizens’ Action Forum, a group of city activists, told ST that it was a bad idea to have the chief minister and deputy chief minister heading the GBA.
He has challenged the GBA in court, saying it violates the Constitution by conflating state and local body governments.
“The new structure pushes Bengaluru towards more state control instead of a municipality-led governance. It is not citizen-centric because it weakens the rung that is closest to the people,” he said.
Mr Alavilli agreed, saying: “If there are incidents like flooding due to bad drains within city limits, the chief minister can’t really be held accountable because he contests elections from a rural district. It makes more sense to have one of the five mayors to be elected as the representative of the GBA.” .
The governance of cities is complex because “their electoral sway is often small compared with the disproportionate influence they wield on the economy”, he added.
For instance, Bengaluru sends only 28 legislators to the 224-member state assembly – 12 per cent of the total seats – but it contributes 43 per cent to the state’s economy and is the symbol of power and prestige for the government.
“Whoever controls Bengaluru is king,” Mr Menon said, explaining the state government’s reluctance to devolve power and give up the golden goose, even when floundering to administer the rapidly growing city.
The state government has already been running Bengaluru for almost a decade, by finding excuses to postpone local body elections to keep the city in the legislators’ grasp.
Given this “political reality”, Mr Ravichandar said placing the chief minister as head of the apex city body is a pragmatic solution.
“The new structure formally brings the state involvement to the forefront, instead of letting it do so from the shadows with no accountability,” he said.
Details of the governance structure would elicit “a yawn from the average Bengalurean”, he admitted, as most of them “just want the city to work”.
The greatest test for the new structure will be whether garbage is collected, road craters disappear, and the wheels of the city turn instead of standing still for hours.