The splitting of Bengaluru’s municipal body exposes a deeper tension

No city plans to become ungovernable. But Bengaluru, like a star grown too big for its own gravity, has begun to wobble. In Karnataka, after years of civic decay, bureaucratic buck-passing, and political evasion, the state has now chosen reform. On 24 April 2025, Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot gave his assent to the Greater Bengaluru Authority Act, setting in motion the most ambitious reorganisation of the city’s civic governance since the formation of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) itself in 2007.

Back then, the BBMP was forged from mergers: eight city municipal councils, one town municipal council, and 110 villages—fused into a single monolithic corporation in the name of efficiency. Eighteen years later, the logic has reversed. The new law proposes to dissolve the BBMP and replace it with up to seven independent city corporations, each with its own mayor and council, operating under the coordinating hand of a Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) chaired by the Chief Minister.

In theory, it is a masterplan for decentralisation: a three-tier system featuring a metropolitan oversight body, multiple autonomous corporations, and empowered ward committees at the grassroots. In practice, however, it has triggered an equally formidable wave of concern—over the consolidation of power at the top, the sidelining of elected representatives, and the spectre of Delhi’s ill-fated experiment with trifurcation.

Bengaluru’s civic sprawl is measurable not just in square kilometres but in sheer institutional fatigue. With a population exceeding 13 million and an urban footprint of over 700 square kilometres, the BBMP was the largest municipal body in southern India, its writ sprawling over 198 wards. Yet elections to the BBMP have not been held since August 2015. The term of the last council expired in September 2020. Since then, Bengaluru has drifted through a series of ad hoc extensions and legal stalemates, its civic machinery crumbling without even the fiction of local representation. In the absence of a functioning civic body, the city has found its own language: flooded roads, broken footpaths, garbage fires, and unfinished flyovers spelling out what official maps refuse to admit.

The Greater Bengaluru Authority Act imagines a new architecture. At the apex sits the GBA—a policy-making and coordinating body headed by the Chief Minister, with the Bengaluru Development Minister, a Chief Commissioner, and various agency heads forming the core. This body is mandated to meet at least once every three months, its decisions requiring a majority vote with a minimum one-third quorum. Beneath it, the monolithic BBMP is to be split into city corporations, each servicing a minimum of ten lakh residents, covering a density of 5,000 persons per square kilometre, and generating at least ₹300 crore annually. No corporation may exceed 150 wards. Workforce reservations are built in, aiming to reflect the city’s social mosaic.

The reform isn’t just on paper—it comes with a whole new cast of officers, advisers, and overlapping authorities. A Chief Commissioner will be appointed for a three-year term, supported by bureaucrats, engineers, planners, vigilance officers, and legal staff. The dissolved BBMP’s workforce will be reassembled into a common administrative cadre. Expert committees will advise on everything from climate resilience to economic development. A 15-member executive committee led by the Bengaluru Development Minister, and six specialised panels, will function in parallel, lending the whole arrangement the elegance of a particularly complicated plumbing system.

On the ground, the ward committee is meant to be the new nerve centre. Each ward will have a 15-member body chaired by the corporator, including representatives from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, women, and local associations. These committees are to be formally registered and theoretically empowered to shape budgets, scrutinise civic services, and act as the citizen’s first government. In principle, this is the fulfilment of the 74th Constitutional Amendment’s vision. In practice, Bengaluru’s long history of ornamental ward committees—with little money, no real decision-making powers, and no authority to compel action—offers reason for scepticism.

Supporters of the Bill look abroad for encouragement. Tokyo’s 23 special wards operate with considerable autonomy under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, demonstrating that a city can be broken into smaller administrative units without losing coherence. Closer home, however, Delhi’s 2012 municipal trifurcation looms as a warning: carving a city into multiple corporations without fiscal coordination and political goodwill produced years of chaos, inequality, and administrative turf wars. Eventually, Delhi was forced to reunify its corporations in 2022, tacitly admitting the failure of the split.

Bengaluru’s planners insist they have learnt from these examples. The Greater Bengaluru Bill includes minimum revenue thresholds for city corporations, aiming to prevent the lopsided development that hobbled Delhi. The GBA, they argue, will ensure consistency across projects, coordinate planning, and oversee inter-jurisdictional services like waste management and mass transit. But what worries critics is not the reform’s ambition, but its centre of gravity.

The GBA is an unelected body with sweeping powers over planning, finance, and civic infrastructure. While the law empowers ward committees and corporations in theory, the metropolitan authority sits atop the pyramid, its decisions binding across all layers. Mayors—directly elected and supposedly powerful—are excluded from the GBA’s decision-making core. The risk, critics argue, is that decentralisation may become a mirage: a redistribution of administrative burdens without a redistribution of authority.

Moreover, the vertical layering of governance could worsen, rather than alleviate, citizen confusion. Bengaluru already suffers from a “many governments” syndrome, with over 30 agencies controlling water, transport, electricity, environment, and policing. A new coordinating body might stitch these agencies together more tightly—or simply add one more player to an already overcrowded field.

The success of the reform depends, therefore, on whether ward committees are truly empowered. Without real control over funds and planning, these committees risk being reduced to ceremonial status. Past experience does not inspire much hope. Even after multiple court orders, the BBMP never genuinely devolved financial autonomy to wards. Citizen submissions to the government during consultations repeatedly stressed that without budgetary control, ward committees would remain glorified feedback kiosks.

There are more immediate and practical worries too. How will ongoing city-wide projects—the Metro expansion, the Peripheral Ring Road, solid waste processing plants—be managed across multiple corporations? How will debts, land assets, and staff be divided? How will resource-rich zones like Central Bengaluru be prevented from pulling even further ahead of outlying areas like Yelahanka, Bommanahalli, and Mahadevapura?

The political timing of the reform has not gone unnoticed. With Assembly elections due in 2026, the reorganisation reshapes the city’s electoral landscape. Smaller corporations mean smaller electoral units, localised campaigns, and the possibility of diffusing anti-incumbency. Opposition parties have alleged that the Bill is a civic gerrymander in all but name, designed to splinter Bengaluru’s political will.

Reform, in the end, is less about design than about disposition—the willingness to cede control, to share budgets, to let wards speak. Paper architectures matter, but political culture matters more. Cities are not rebuilt by legislation alone. They change when power learns to loosen its grip, when distant authorities trust the small, the local, the near. For Bengaluru, a city long trapped between promise and paralysis, the real work will not be in splitting maps or redrawing wards, but in remembering that a city is governed best by those closest to its broken pavements and unfinished crossings.

BBMPBengaluruBruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara PalikeGreater Bengaluru Authority ActNews BriefThaawarchand Gehlotthree-tier systemWeb Exclusive