March 2009 Edition
Subir Roy
Bangalore
BANGALORE has traditionally been strong on voluntary initiative and this has spawned a new public private partnership venture to come to grips with the city's intractable problems. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Karnataka and prominent NGO Janaagraha have taken the lead to form Bangalore City Connect.
The thought that made this happen is the realisation among business that "corporate social responsibility initiatives are not enough and something more needs to be done to come to grips with our urban problems; this is critical since, if the city survives, business survives," says V Ravichandar, managing director of Feedback Consulting and veteran "civic catalyst" in the now broad PPP space.
The City Connect platform, though started by business, is open for any NGO or residents' welfare association to join by endorsing its charter. Some of its more prominent institutional members are ABLE, the association of biotechnology firms, local chambers of commerce like BCIC and FKCCI and the national association of software and services firms, NASSCOM. Enabling City Connect is a non-profit trust, Bangalore City Connect Foundation, born in 2007 after the Bangalore Urban Declaration was adopted. Bangalore City Connect is building up a corpus through membership fees and spending commitments, with around Rs 80 lakhs collected so far.
Other than business associations, civil society groups and state agencies form its two main categories of participants. The latter is vital as not only do you need the state agencies by your side to get virtually anything done, to retain the latter's continued support it is necessary to ask "what's in it for the state agencies for them to want to work with you," adds Ravichandar. He should know because he was a key force in the highly successful Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF) which made a mark in the city during the early part of the decade but folded up with the change of government in 2004.
What does City Connect have to offer? It has both paid professionals and volunteers. The task it has set before itself is to develop a systematic long range process to work with the government to improve Bangalore. For each specific project there will be an MoU between City Connect and government. The former will hand over drawings and plans for traffic or local solutions which it has developed for the government to implement.
Its first broad endeavour is the Bangalore Traffic and Transport Initiative for which it is the horizontal coordinator. For this the Karnataka government has created the Bangalore Metropolitan Land Transport Authority as the nodal agency to provide a platform for traffic agencies to work together. The first specific project City Connect is handling is a plan to enhance mobility around the highway interchange near the new airport.
As far as the lay public is concerned, City Connect first impinged on its consciousness when a couple of years ago just before the launch of the new Bangalore international airport it filed a public interest litigation pleading that the city should have two airports and the old HAL airport not be closed down. Nothing came of it but City Connect in a way got off the ground. The first bit of public action City Connect took was to provide 50 traffic wardens for around six months when the new airport opened to facilitate the smooth flow of traffic around it.
Bangalore City Connect, which is headed by CEO Kersi Wadia, has till now maintained a low profile, perhaps mindful of the lesson learnt from the demise of BATF that being high profile can have its disadvantages. It is popularly believed that one of the reasons why BATF was grounded was that the bureaucracy felt threatened. It had access to ideas, funds and politicians. The then Chief Minister S M Krishna was a sort of patronin- chief. "City Connect is still below the radar and can do with more patrons in government," admits Ravichandar who has no formal role in it but is very much of a facilitator.
When BATF folded up word of what it had
achieved in Bangalore had spread to other parts of
the country. Delhi, for example, showed an interest
but nothing much came of it. An implicit lesson
that seems to have been learnt is to keep such
initiatives as decentralised as possible right from
day one. Now a Chennai City Connect has come
into existence founded by CII, Tamil Nadu, with
Janaagraha as a knowledge partner. The two
prime movers are Gopal Srinivasan, chairman of
TVS Capital Funds and GRK Reddy, chairman of MARG, an infrastructure and construction firm.
City Connect Chennai has taken two initiatives. One is a regional development plan for Chennai, codenamed MAP because it takes in three satellite towns Marakonam, Arakonam and Pulicat. Regional development with high speed links to the satellites will ensure that improvements in Chennai do not attract even more people to it.
City Connect has also formulated a plan to reengineer traffic with the pedestrian in mind on Chennai's Lattice Bridge Road. The Chennai Municipal Corporation will implement the project. What is more, preliminary meetings have been held for a City Connect for Cochin under the Urban Kerala Mission and one more city, Pune, has begun to show interest. This is the way the idea of City Connect is expected to grow horizontally with citizens and business in different cities taking ownership of the initiative.
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