With the city administration aggressively pushing for a series of large projects such as pod taxis and tunnels to ease traffic, questions on the decision-making process and the lack of a reliable funding model have again come to the forefront.
Consider three mega infrastructure projects K.J. George, Bengaluru Development Minister, has been pushing for: One is an ambitious network of elevated corridors of over 100 km in the city at an estimated cost of ₹25,000 crore. Then there’s the proposal to build four tunnels in the city totalling to a length of 17.65 km at an estimated cost of over ₹10,000 crore. And the third are pod taxis on six stretches in the city at a cost of over ₹1,700 crore. In a city that is struggling to get skywalks built, will any of these projects see the light of the day?
No public consultations were held before selecting the projects. The cash-strapped government agencies, unwilling to spend a rupee on them, want to implement the projects through the Build Own Operate and Transfer (BOOT) model under public-private partnership. However, to date, no project has received any funding from interested parties.
While the pod taxis and the tunnels are relatively new, the city administration has been pitching the network of elevated corridors at multiple avenues for two years now, including at Invest Karnataka 2016, but failed to receive any interested bidders.
Pod taxis
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) has called for an Expression of Interest (EoI) for pod taxis on six stretches totalling to 35.5 km at an estimated cost of over ₹1,700 crore. N. Manjunath Prasad, BBMP Commissioner, said while a private firm had come forward to do a small pilot stretch as proof of concept, the project was yet to receive bidders. The bid is open till the first week of June.
Skywalks in the city
However, the city administration hasn’t had success in attracting private investment for infrastructure projects. For instance, the BBMP has issued multiple tenders to build over a 100 skywalks in the city to no success. The State government has announced a gap funding of ₹80 crore in the recent State budget. This is even as a skywalk project costs just over ₹3 crore and the investor will have the advertising rights for twenty years.
PPP projects
But why is it so? V. Ravichandar, member, BBMP Restructuring Committee, said that nowhere in the country had PPP projects been successful in the city centre, except the Worli Sea Link in Mumbai. The successes have mostly been in the highways sector, he pointed out.
“None of the proposed PPP projects for the city have a robust revenue model to recover investments. Moreover, from experience, investors – especially multi-nationals – prefer to deal with the State government and are weary of local city governments,” he said.
Urbanist Ashwin Mahesh had a different take on the issue. He argued that the problem was in the selection of projects. None of the projects for which the government was seeking private investments were conceptualised following the identification of a gap in the infrastructure and a subsequent study on the feasible solutions, he pointed out. Like the steel flyover, mega projects are being moved from drawing boards to execution without any consultation, he said.
