ಬ್ಲಾಗ್ ಗಳು

The BBMP Elections 2010

26 March 2010 - 10:42am — psaram42

"Electioneering for the BBMP polls virtually concluded on Thursday late night with the 66.19 lakh Bangalore electorate getting set to vote on Sunday. Technically the candidates had time till Friday 7 am to end their campaign, but with the ban on using the public address system after 10 pm, the candidates had to close shop on Thursday night." See the TOI article here.

The campaign has been very vigorous. The door to door campaign has been very good with distribution of election ID of each voter in a house hold. I have got this info from both BJP and the congress.

Walkability & electricity

26 March 2010 - 8:31am — idontspam

“Overhead electrical cabling is a hazard to human life and property and poses an obstacle to road widening.The danger is even greater during the rainy and windy seasons. Also, a lot of power is stolen by miscreants,” - A Bangalorean is determined to convince the government to go in for underground electrical cabling in the city

I think the KPTCL & Bescom need to take this up on priority. This is an investment worth making. I know the linemen will lose gimbla as it will become harder to enable people to steal electricity. More than road widening 90% of obstructions on sidewalks/footpaths are related to electrical poles and transformers.

Let us take this up with our new corporators who will be at work soon.

Town Planning - Introduction

24 March 2010 - 8:42pm — psaram42

General:

The planet earth appears blue from outer space due to the huge amount of water covering the globe. The exposed land above this ocean water is only 30% the ocean water portion being the remaining 70%. India stands 7^th nation after Russia and china in its extant of land which is about 32,263 Sq km. This land asset available to the earthlings, which is the fundamental asset, is limited in its extent. This asset belongs to the entire life system that exists at any point of time on this planet. It can only be borrowed for temporary convenience by any life that exists on the planet at any time period.

Feeder Routes as 'Branded' Service

24 March 2010 - 4:45pm — Srivatsava

One of the most publisied initivates of the BMTC last year was the intoroduction of the Big10 routes. On some routes, it was just a renaming of the route number, but it was always useful since it was 'Branded Service'. People anywhere can easily identify a Big-10 bus easily and a lot of people realise the routes that these buses ply on.

Another branding attempt from BMTC has been the 'Big Circle', for buses that ply mainly on the Ring Road. I happened to see a K-series bus on Jayanagar 30th Cross and this has been on Praja before. Vajra, Vayu Vajra and Atal Saarige have also been some other 'branding' attempts by BMTC.

For the two bus days (Feb and March), BMTC had made arrangements to run feeder services in select areas. Some of these are permanent in nature and not restricted to only a day in a month. There have been other feeder services (FDR1 to FDR-6 for the Uttarahalli/Chikkalsandra/BSK areas being one of the earliest). Why cant these buses be branded in a common way?

War Memorial OK - But not in my backyard, says Infosys HR Head

23 March 2010 - 11:03pm — kbsyed61

It seems the steam for opposition to War memorial is picking up. Apart from Justice Saldhana, now the ABIde member themselves are crying hoarse. But the circumstances seems to suggest something contrary to their public statements. It looked like, War memorial is OK, but not in my backyard.

Courtsey - Sights, Sound and Smell from Bangalore

"..The National Military Memorial was an idea originally mooted by the Agenda for Bangalore Infrastructure and Development Task Force (ABIde) headed by Rajeev Chandrashekar. But its own members are now coming out in protest against the proposed venue.
Mohan Das Pai, one of its key members who resides close to the park, said the idea of a war memorial for our heroes is indeed a fine one because their stories have to be told. “But the venue is certainly not acceptable to me.” ..."

For more read here

New navigation on Praja

23 March 2010 - 5:17pm — tech

We at the tech team are happy to announce new and improved navigation features on Praja.in. These will be launched today. We hope that the changes make it easier for our users to find, read and create relevant content on the site. Read on to know more about the new navigation.

Changed front page

The homepage of Praja (http://praja.in) now has a simplified look when you are not logged in. It has a small slideshow to tell what Praja is about and leads to creating or finding discussions. (We are currently working on improving the looks of the graphics and buttons on this page). This design is done keeping in mind the new users to the Praja community who want to understand what Praja is about.

When the users login, the front page will automatically change to a more personal version. This page is the centre of all the action on Praja for all the users.

PrajaBytes

Why I will not vote for JD(S) in this election, or ever.

23 March 2010 - 12:09pm — murali772

With state JD(S) chief H D Kumaraswamy on Monday brazenly saying that he saw nothing wrong in fielding criminals if they looked like winnable candidates, the comfort that Bangaloreans enjoyed, compared to those living in the cow belt, has evaporated. In an exclusive interaction with TOI ahead of BBMP polls, Kumaraswamy said that his criteria for giving tickets to criminals is simple: he/she should have the support of party workers and people of the area and should be able to win. Obviously a case of political arithmetic trumping morals and scruples. But, is it right to bring criminals into politics? “What’s wrong? It’s a chance for them to reform. If they change, isn’t it an achievement and better for the society?”

BTC - Is this the end ?

23 March 2010 - 9:07am — Naveen

" The Karnataka High Court on Monday dismissed Bangalore Turf Club’s plea for more time and directed it to vacate the premises by September 22. The BTC’s plea — that the grant of land by the Mysore Maharaja’s government in 1915 was absolute — failed to impress the Bench, which made it clear that BTC needs to relocate "

" Court asks government to preserve race course area as open space, suggests creation of mini forest No direction to government to give alternative land to BTC ORDER, ORDER The petitioner club cannot seek alternative land as a matter of right for racing and allied activities — Karnataka HC "

The dry leaves disposal problem.

22 March 2010 - 12:59pm — psaram42

As the spring season comes every year there is the dry leaves season preceding it. The street sweepers have hectic work gathering the dry leaves by sweeping them into big mounds. It is really funny that the regular garbage collectors are no way responsible for the leaves final disposal.

BMTC audit by CAG

22 March 2010 - 12:18am — vinod_shankar

Recently CAG had done a audit of BMTC , an article has been published on the same in business standard.

http://www.business-stand...

Some of important points in the report

1.For year-ended March 2009, the corporation has reported a 60.6 per cent drop in the net profit at Rs 55.18 crore, compared to the previous year.

2. an operating loss of Rs 20.6 crore compared to an operating profit of Rs 70.8 crore for 2008-09 as against the previous year.

3. The earnings per kilometre (KM) was Rs 24.63 and expended Rs 23.28 per KM during the year.

4.carried an average of 3.66 million passengers per day

5. the number of trips operated by the corporation increased to 25 million in 2008-09 from 16 million in 2004-05, the percentage of trips checked to the trips operated declined 1.17 per cent from 1.65 per cent in 2004-05

vinod

Bad Planning by Mantri Mall Malleswaram

21 March 2010 - 7:53pm — ranga

Quite a few days back i wrote about the Bad planning of Bigbazaar, where their were very less parking space made available and the vehicles hundreds of them parked on the road or adjecent bylanes, creating major traffic jams in that area.

Now it is the turn of Mantri Mall @ Malleswaram, in the weekend of last week and this week, the entire area is in a mess, by 4 pm in the evening( when i crossed that area) , the mall has put a sign board saying the parking is full. You can see hundreds of vehicles both two wheelers and four wheelers being parked in the adjacent roads, creating traffic jam, which amounted to about 45 mins of travel for a short distance of half a KM. You can see people with vehicles arguing with the police and the mall's security guards for parking.

Report on 'Suvarna Bengaluru Pranalike'

20 March 2010 - 5:28pm — murali772

This was organised by Janaagraha's Jaagte Raho campaign at 6 PM on Friday, the 19th Mar, at the Town Hall, Bengaluru, in the background of the BBMP elections being held on the coming Sunday (28th March,'10)

On infrastructure
From Mr R V Deshpande of Congress to Ms Shabha Karandlaje to Mr Narayanaswamy of JD(S), all made claims of how they were responsible for building up the infrastructure for the city - from the Hebbal fly-over to the K R Puram cable-stayed fly-over, to the signal-free corridors, etc, etc. Towards the end, when a question raised by a participant as to 'where the pedestrian came into view in all of these', was put to them, suddenly, each made a u-turn and started talking about how they plan to make the city totally pedestrian and cycle friendly.

Well, to symbolise the entire polity's commitment to this changed approach, can a consensus be possibly arrived at to demolish the totally useless National College fly-over, apart from of course dropping the Tagore circle underpass and such useless projects?

On corruption

Padmanabhanagar doomed - rest of Bengaluru too?

20 March 2010 - 2:05pm — murali772

The following is the report by Sri N S Mukunda, Convener of Abhyudaya, a federation of RWAs in Padmanabhanagar, on the debate they organised between the BBMP Corporator candidates on 19th March. The prospects for the ward look pathetic. And, like Mr Mukunda has pointed out "I am sure that the expecrience is similar except in the degree of disappointment in other constituencies as well", and offered the possible way out as "like many of our colleaguews have done in this election only jump into the fray and contest and try to win - time we start thinking of far beyond this tokenism".

We from Abhyudya in ward 182 Padmanabhanagar, had a debate with the candidates of Congress (Sri Murali), JD(S) (Sri Anjanappa). The BJP candidate Sri L Srinivasa, the ex corporator did not turn up, in spite of being invited. The debate took place yesterday evening at 5.30 PM and went on till 7.15 PM.

Bellandur Lake Fencing

20 March 2010 - 12:34am — pravn1984

Today, while passing by bellandur tank bund road, I noticed that the lake was being fenced.

There were two sets of fencing being done. One on the boundary of the lake - on one side of the road, and the other on the opposite side of the road. I did not have a camera( camera phone) to take the pics.( will try to do the same in my next visit or some other praja can fill on the same).

I am presuming this is part of this project of chain link fencing a host of lakes in city.

I checked the tenders for the same has been already awarded ( can be checked in this site

eproc.karnataka.gov.in . So, probably this activity has started for other lakes also.

This is atleast a start in improving/cleaning/maintaining this lake. However, one thing to worry about is there is no plan of green belt for bellandur lake. There seems to be no space earmarked for the same either.

BTMC Issues - From RCA Perspective-2

19 March 2010 - 3:19pm — Bheema.Upadhyaya

This is in continuation of my last post. This time I thought to take delayed disturbed scheduling. As you all aware, RCA is simple technique to find out root causes and thus first step to eliminate bad causes. Some of the caused may be repetitive from last post. But if repeated it should be considered as a major cause and should be given priority.

Effect -

Buses not operating in time thus causing inconvinience to public and to BMTC scheduling system itself

Causes due to -

1. Traffic Jam at Signal due to

-> Long Signals

-> Heavy Vehicle Rush

-> No traffic Management in junctions

-> No signal

2. Traffic Jam at Roads due to