murali , the only thing i am suprised about is the fact that you were surprised by the politicians ignorance.

the 74th is too esoteric a subject for even the best of them  and remeber this is one amendment on which amnesia helps beacause it really is about divesting of power!!

vijayan 

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thanks for this important note. i didnt clearly know the distinctions either. but we have been saying similar things for the longest time. maintenance, upkeep and even certain development should be routine and systemic. it should not be dependent on who sits in VS. and the recent trend of everybody in VS upto the CM getting his hands dirty in issues like where to build the next G/S instead of dealing with systemic issues is a dangerous trend. its so well established that, for nearly two years now we have no ULB and nobody seems to care. ofcourse, this post is about about 'constitutional' boundaries, but let me rant off a bit more tangentially... that the 'administrators' put their fingers into such things and even campaign for it is a sure shot sign that these issues are not going to resolved in a sustainable manner in the near future, even if in the short term we see one road here and another there being done. it is not guaranteed that the next time it breaks, it will be fixed in a systematic manner and sort of 'automatically'. that was the halmark of Manivannan's administration in hubli. he tried to build a system that would flag and resolve issues self sufficiently. citizen committees identify issues, propose and make a case for the solutions and work with officials in execution. instead of working with the system, the corporators in mysore tried to scuttle it, in the fear that there was less for them to dispose, bcoz the projects could only be taken up if flagged by CAC. i can see some problems wrt dealing with things that are a part of network(roads, sewage, water etc) with this approach, but that is clearly the way to go for local maintenance and upkeep type of issues. i cannot say much about whether he succeeded in building such systems, or of his predecessors continued in his path, but from following his work, it did appear like he was trying to fix the part of the system that he was incharge of, rather than fix the road. btw, in dealing with the system, many roads did get fixed. his approach also provides a refreshing perspective on public-private way of looking at things. what if you make the ulb like a public held organization, with 'share' holders having a say in some decisions? on the other hand, just like you can elect the board of a publicly held company, perhaps you should be able to elect the board of bmtc, bwssb, etc ... issues such as these should remove political interference to a certain extent. with politicians only holding the money tap.

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