Last year’s floods playing on the minds of voters in Bengaluru this election season

Many parts of Bengaluru, especially its information technology (IT) corridor on the K. R. Puram–Sarjapur Road axis, got flooded during the heavy rain in September 2022, putting the city in the headlines again for the wrong reasons. Last year’s floods are playing on the minds of voters this election season and MLAs seem to be facing a strong anti-incumbency factor in pockets that were inundated.

Many parts of Bengaluru, especially its information technology (IT) corridor on the K. R. Puram–Sarjapur Road axis, got flooded during the heavy rain in September 2022, putting the city in the headlines again for the wrong reasons. Last year’s floods are playing on the minds of voters this election season and MLAs seem to be facing a strong anti-incumbency factor in pockets that were inundated.

The strongest acknowledgement of this came from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when it denied the ticket to its three-time MLA Arvind Limbavali from the Mahadevapura constituency, which houses the IT corridor and suffered the most in the 2022 floods. “The party’s internal surveys showed Mr. Limbavali was facing strong anti-incumbency, especially after last year’s floods and his chances of victory again were slim. But in a scenario where senior leaders such as Jagadish Shettar defected, we compromised and gave the ticket to his wife,” said a senior BJP leader from the city. However, multiple voters from the constituency The Hindu spoke to are not happy with the possibility of Mr. Limbavali trying to rule by proxy. 

Ajit Sequeira from Whitefield Rising said floods are definitely on the minds of voters in the constituency, but rather than discussing the micro issues such as drains and encroachments, the Million Voters Rising Citizen Manifesto they have released demands a separate municipal corporation for Mahadevapura, which, they argue, will help address the systemic problem better.

Jagadish Reddy from Varthur Rising said that for the first time, people had begun asking questions about the “all-pervading” corruption that allowed encroachments and resulted in floods. V. Ramprasad, a lake conservation activist, said during his interaction with communities affected by floods, people had begun to ask the right questions — if they knew this was the lowest point in the area, it was flood-prone or it was encroached upon, they wouldn’t have bought this property. “All these questions point to the systemic corruption at the top of which sit the MLAs. So there is a lot of anti-incumbency against MLAs in pockets affected by floods,” he said. 

When Sai Layout got flooded in September 2022, local MLA and Urban Development Minister Byrathi Basavaraj faced public anger in front of television cameras, embarrassing him and prompting him to promise the issue would be resolved before the elections. “No permanent corrective measures have been initiated in the area and come another rain it will mostly be flooded again. We are tired of complete apathy by the political class to our problems,” said Rajashekhar, a resident of K.R. Puram. Similarly, incumbent MLAs Satish Reddy, S.R. Vishwanath, and K. Gopalaiah from Bommanahalli, Yelahanka, and Mahalakshmi Layout, respectively, are facing anti-incumbency from pockets that were flooded last year.

However, the ruling BJP is trying to negate the anti-incumbency over floods claiming that they are the first to give good funding for the redevelopment of storm-water drains (SWDs) and has promised to install sluice gates in all lakes of the city, which will eventually prevent flooding. Post the floods in 2022, Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai, who also holds the charge of Bengaluru development, directed officials to prepare a master plan of SWDs and increased funding for their ongoing redevelopment. He announced a ₹3,000-crore World Bank-assisted project to mitigate the impact of climate change in the city.

While data shows that Mr. Bommai provided funds for the redevelopment of 195 km of SWDs in 2022, the highest in any single year, it also displays a pattern where governments have been forced into action on the redevelopment of SWDs and clearing their encroachments after every flooding but the work slows down later. For instance, the redevelopment of SWDs and encroachment clearance drive first picked up pace when the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government was in power in 2016, following floods in many parts of the city that year; the work slowed down and again picked up pace in 2022 after another round of floods. However, experts argue that not only the SWD encroachment clearance drives, which are active in spurts, are an eyewash mostly, but the survey identifying encroachments itself is vastly incomplete. Meanwhile, there are also allegations against MLAs that the encroachment clearance drive has been very selective.