By Balaji Parthasarathy

While the proposed trifurcation of the BBMP has generated heated rhetoric about the motives and intent, there is, unfortunately, little analytical light on what the move will mean for the citizen. According to the Karnataka Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Bill, 2015, the rationale behind trifurcation is the difficulty in administering a city with a population of more than 8 million, by a single corporation.

Although any effort to improve the city administration, with better services among other things, is welcome, linking city size to effective administration is questionable. On the one hand, the provision of many urban services is not even the responsibility of the BBMP . They are provided by parastatals such as the BWSSB. Indeed, the Bill cites the need to better the implementation of state and central schemes, among its rationale. Even for services that remain with the BBMP (roads or health), arguments about the benefits of a smaller city ignore a torturous debate among urban planners and geographers in the 1960s and 1970s about optimal city size.

Assuming trifurcation takes place, how might it work? We can look to examples of large US metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles, which are jurisdictionally fragmented into small cities.

The late economist Charles Tiebout argued that fragmentation allows small jurisdictions to offer different `bundles' of public services, giving citizens the possibility of "voting with their feet" i.e. to move to the jurisdiction that provides the mix of services that suits them best. But, by assuming easy mobility of citizens across boundaries, the Tiebout model is problematic in contexts such as India, where access to opportunities, jobs in particular, are limited by socio-economic barriers.

Finally, there is the issue of how the jurisdictions will be drawn. Since the Bill says the new urban bodies will inherit the assets and liabilities of the BBMP, the equity and allocative justice of the new spatial distribution remain open questions. Thus, despite the best in tentions, growth and interdependencies among the new jurisdictions could result just as well in a fragmentation of problems and the harried citizen being forced to run pillar-to-post seeking solutions from multiple agencies instead of one.

The writer is a professor, Centre for IT & Public Policy, IIIT-B