Folks at Hebbal have come out with a revolutionary idea. The Hebbal-jana plan to get together and thrash out a plan for Hebbal. Next, they will hand this plan to their MLA, with the express understanding that he will execute that plan.
Very interesting dont you think? I am salivating imagining the possibilities and fallouts. People's ideas will get executed. But more interestingly can you imagine what it can do to governance and electoral and devlopment politics? Awesome. Hebbal-janre, all the best.
Agenda for Hebbal development
DH News Service, Bangalore:
http://deccanherald.com/C...
Agenda for Hebbal Development (AHEAD), a unique body organized to elicit people's participation for drawing up an agenda for the development of Hebbal assembly constituency, will hold a workshop on August 2 in the City.
Among those behind the initiative are Minister for Information, ITBT, Excise and BWSSB Katta Subramanya Naidu, Advanced Research Institute, a NGO consisting of scientists, academia, social workers, business people and other sensitive citizens of the city, Katta Foundations, Hebbal Constituency Development Monitoring Committee and Citizen's Welfare Foundation, Bangalore.
The interactive workshop will elicit participation from residents, industrialists, academia, experts in various fields such as water, sanitation, health and education residing in Hebbal assembly constituency to plan, design and become a part of the execution of a road map for the development of the area.
The document drawn up after the workshop will become the master plan for the development of Hebbal assembly constituency. The document will be handed over to the area MLA and will become the basis for all developmental plans of the area. For more on the workshop at Taralabalu Kendra, RT Nagar, call 9880472269.
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Koramangala too
In fact, at our last meeting with Mr Ramalinga Reddy, Maj Kapur and I talked of a similar development plan for Koramangala. He welcomed the idea. Now that RT Nagar has set some kind of a template, it should speed up the way for us.
Muralidhar Rao
oh cool!
Truely a way AHEAD
To begin with AHEAD was much ahead for the simple fact that it was organized at a much lower grassroots level. There were no flashy brochures or beautiful ladies welcoming the participants. Every thing was simple and worked well.
I should confess my opinion of Mr Katta Subramanya Naidu (MLA of Hebbal constituency) has completely changed after this event. What I saw there was a person who was not only in command but also well informed of the ground realities and had a plan in mind to solve them. To be frank he was better informed than many of the officials in the meeting. He being a senior member of BJP and a minister will obviously help the constituency (just to make it clear I am a politically neutral person). He was also pretty fluent in English.
The format of the function was pretty simple. The officials gave a 5 minute talk on what they had done and what they will be doing. Officials included people from health department, revenue department, food and civil supplies department, storm water drain department, police (traffic and civil) department, BWSSB and roads department. Each official had to give his contact number and the general public was requested to approach them directly if they had any problems. Just to check how responsive they will be I will be calling a few of these people this week (no I am not only a crackpot; I also have some genuine issues). All the participants were give a plain sheet of paper and were requested to fill in their details and any problems/suggestions. Most of these suggestions were read towards the end of the program (in the interactive session) and it was promised that complainants would be called and informed about the status of their suggestion/complaints. There were close to 300 people which also included representatives of the various citizen welfare associations.
Some of plans for the constituency included
When I was just thinking that these could just be another set of false promises, they announced that they would have such a meeting every 3 months and review the progress. That was like the icing on the cake. This should certainly force the officials to deliver. A few officials were literally trembling to speak in front the MLA. The MLA also took to task a few officials publicly (this is something which I didn’t like, I believe there should be some professionalism).
Like in all new initiative there was a lot of scope for improvement. Not many people knew of this event and the public were unruly sometimes (but I guess it was only a reflections of their frustration towards the system). One thing that they could do is to ask the citizen welfare associations to collect data from residents and then invite only the representative of these associations to the meeting. That way things would be more organized and more effective. Also the officials should be advised not to start their talk by saluting each and every dignitary present at the event – they just blow of 2 mins of the allotted 5 mins in this non-sense talk
It would be a great idea to have such events in all constituencies. A good thing to do would be to fine tune them based on the experience of this event.
AHEAD - Sanjaynagar main road suggestions
The sanjaynagar main road is a single lane (each way) road. There is already parking by cars and 2 wheelers on the road and on top of it encroachments on the footpath by the shops means the people walk on the road beyond the parked vehicles effectively making it into half a lane each way. I am not surprised this main road is choked all the time. All they need to do is
1. Make the entire strecth (upto ring road beyond nagashettyhalli) a no stopping and parking zone. Parking needs to be arranged on the side roads.
2. Remove encroachments on the pavements by the shopkeepers and put up railing in narrow areas (like geddlahalli) so people dont have to walk on the roads risking their lives
3. Run mini buses on this route with increased frequency to Nagashettyhalli and Bhoopsandra as the roads (sanjaynagar main road and bhoopsandra main road) are too narrow to take the bigger full service buses.
Ritesh I could not attend the meeting please let me know how I can reach these suggestions to concerned authorities
AHEAD
Moving AHEAD
Tarle - I don’t know who's idea it was, but it had the complete backing of Mr Naidu. He himself was reading through all the suggestions/recommendations and making notes on each of them. He moderated the entire event himself. He also strictly instructed the officials to take note of all the complaints raised by the people and send him the minutes of the meeting. That was some professionalism. I am just hoping all this was not a public stunt. I know a few people who nurture their constituencies, as you said, if these things are for real, it will beat anti-incumbency. I will try and meet Mr Shetty. I don’t know if I can get through to Mr Naidu directly (though I will try).
Idontspam – I will revert back to you with the details you requested for. From your description, I guess you should be staying in this part of the city. Why don’t we meet up sometime, compile all the issues and take it to Mr Naidu directly or through Mr Shetty (of Advance Research Institute). My email id is rithesh.rg[at]gmail[dot]com.
Also all hebbal vasigale (residents of hebbal) if you have any suggestions please share it and get involved.
Wonderful report Rithesh
Wonderful report on this meeting Rithesh.
Prajagale' - please post reports from such meetings as and when you attend. Good words from the Hebbal meeting have spread far and wide already, so we should soon see this in all the areas of Bangalore. And then people will stop talking about Kasturi Rangan Committee report :)
When an MLA conducts such a meeting, and that too an open one, it has some legitimacy, in the sense that MLA is after all constitutionally elected leader of the area. These meetings have to be either conducted by a "certified" (as in democratically elected)
body or leader, or must be open. Best is both (like this one was).
Looking forward to attending such a thing in Mahadevapura (my constituency - MLA Mr Arvind Limbavalli) with the hope that one will take place sometime soon.