Austerity? At BBMP? Forget it
Despite staring at a deep financial crisis and pledging city’s heritage structures.
Bangalore: Despite staring at a deep financial crisis and pledging city’s heritage structures, the BBMP refuses to take up austerity measures.
The palike can save large amounts of money by avoiding consultancy services for all its major projects and sticking to the sanctioned number of posts. On an average, the BBMP spends '10 crore to get consultancy reports from various agencies for its projects.
“The BBMP has a full-fledged engineering staff, then where is the need to entrust an outside agency to seek Detailed Project Reports (DPRs),” questioned M.K. Gunashekar, who is a former opposition leader in the BBMP council and a member of the Congress.
The BBMP is also the target of officials from other departments, who are looking for lucrative postings. These officers on special duty (OSDs) draw fat salaries and drain the palike’s exchequer of precious financial resources, affecting the functioning of the civic body.
Town planning, forest and engineering are some of the departments that need to be streamlined to achieve financial stability, Gunashekar suggested.