Why do big projects get stalled in the city? Simple - a lot of people have a vested interest in getting projects STARTED, but there's not enough money to accommodate such wide-spread opportunism. As a result, we start more projects than we can complete with the funds available.

Plus, in the worst cases, some contractors get paid even without doing any work, so there is even less money for the work itself subsequently. The entire system works as if the flow of money and the flow of outcomes are unrelated, like ships passing each other in the night.

A few years ago, I asked the BBMP Commissioner how many ongoing works there were in the municipality. (mind you, this does not include the water board, the EB, BMTC, etc - just BBMP). A little poking around after that revealed that there were 33,000 projects going on !!

So we carried out a little exercise to see how many were real, and how many were just submitting bills for clearance even though they were not projects approved by BBMP at all. And the answer - only about 1/4th of the projects were genuine.

But it's not simple to tackle this. The city is too large, and the systems are too weak to stop this. The only thing that can staunch this flow is if more people get involved in their respective localities. Then the solution becomes distributed, and local.

This is why ward committees are important. They help decentralise the accountability. Now, of course, we don't have councillors because the council's term has ended without elections to the next term. But the ward committees should continue to meet, regardless.