The City Municipal Councils of Tumkur, Shimoga and Bijapur have all been upgraded as city corporations, with Governor H.R. Bhardwaj approving a notification late on Friday.
Earlier proposal
The incumbent government had been planning to upgrade the three city municipal councils into city corporations based on a proposal which was initially mooted by the previous government of Jagadish Shettar.
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At a recent meeting of the State Cabinet, Minister for Urban Development Vinay Kumar Sorake had placed the proposal to upgrade the three towns as municipal corporations given the increase in population.
With the addition of the three new municipal corporations, the total number of the corporations in the State will increase to 11. The others are Bangalore, Mangalore, Mysore, Davangere, Bellary, Gulbarga, Hubli-Dharwad and Belgaum.
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Sources in the State government told The Hindu that with the upgrading, Shimoga, Tumkur and Bijapur will stand to benefit in a big way given the fact that the Union government will allocate special funds for their all-round development. Plans are also afoot to develop Tumkur as a satellite town to decongest Bangalore, which is almost 850 sq. km and a population of around 1 crore.