silkboard's blog

I say good job BESCOM as far as automation is concerned. Those hand-helds to instantly print out your monthly electricity bill, and these automatic payment accepting machines.

We have all been screaming on the subject for a while now. But this business-standard update on BIAL expressway is interesting, because it talks dates:

... sources said many powerful politicians also owned land along the alignment ... and wanted it changed ... “We changed the alignment five times unofficially before freezing it. But they are still not satisfied. If the land acquisition process is completed by July, the expressway will be ready by March 2009 but that appears improbable. As things stand, the expressway will not be ready even by 2009-end,” a source said.

Just read through Bangalore Metro's August'07 updates. Read through the first few pages of that pdf, and you realize that land acquisition seems to be delaying a few tasks - notice the schedule column, search for phrases "revised" or "after land acquisition".

These delays were always expected to be a part of the project, so no complaints there. But one key update you and I should look forward to takes the cake as far as disclosing information is concerned:

I read at least two newspapers everyday, and one feature I like is - letters to editor. Sometimes, you also hear of 'success stories' (like Nisho's about an open drain) resulting from these letters.

Well, I am a fan of this reality-TV like content. If you ask me, newspapers can chose to go the rediff way (have you seen their news article based bulletin boards?) and start having an extra page full of these letters from readers. Yes that will sell well :) But actually, I read these letters - especially the ones that complain about a local service or public amenity - because they put me in these chains of thoughts:

Spotted this tender recently on BBMP website. Have a look, a lot of roadwork coming up in Mahadevapura, Marathahalli and Whitefield sub-divisions - about 6 crore worth of work for each.

How about we track this work? Basically, write to BBMP and ask them to publish the deadlines, actual money spent, what standards will be used to determine completion of work etc? Anyone interested? 3-4 of us can try do this together as an experiement to see how much effort it takes for citizens to really be in the know.

Going by his media talk, Mr Ashok Kheny is sure sounding aggressive and even more determined about his pet project. Here is some interesting stuff I picked out from his recent statements and interviews. First the TOI interview (Sunday, Aug 12).

"... some IAS officers then came to me and advised me to change the alignment as their properties were getting affected..."

"He (Deve Gowda) told me to let go off 245 acres and in return, promised me 5000 acres elsewhere. I learnt through officials that he had made some commitments during the elections that the land will be de-notified"