Bangalore Crumbling Part 3

BANGALORE CRUMBLING: PART THREE
India Inc cheered as he worked to revamp the city and then new govt shunted him out
In rebuilding a city, he’s ranked only after Delhi Metro man E Sreedharan. But Jayakar Jerome angered land mafia. Rs 1,600-cr corpus he created is up for grabs, he’s out and vilified by Deve Gowda

The Indian Express

‘‘He was one of the finest officers I have seen in terms of conceptualising and implementation. To my mind, he would rank in the top 2 per cent of India’s bureaucracy.’’

Infosys Chairman N R Narayana Murthy, a man with little patience for blemished work, does not dish out praise lightly. Closely involved with state government efforts to refurbish Bangalore, Murthy was talking to The Indian Express of Jayakar Jerome, a bureaucrat who in four years gave Bangalore a vision of what might be, rebuilding the city with the vision and speed of an Infosys software programme.

In the four years before he was unceremoniously turfed out as Commissioner of the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA)—to remarkable scenes of weeping staff—the Indian Administrative Service officer of the 1974 batch managed to keep the city abreast with its explosive growth.

With a crack team of planners, engineers and finance specialists—overseen by the city’s best minds in the form of the Bangalore Agenda Task Force monitoring his work—Jerome and his team worked 24/7, kept Bangalore going (see box), and turned around a demoralised, loss-making government organisation.

And all this without central funding, without ruinous debt.

When Jerome took over the BDA in 1999, it was about to be shut down by the government. Today, it’s the toast of urban governance with a cash stash of Rs 1,600 crore.

But Jerome isn’t around to start the next stage of city building with the money. As Secretary of the Minority Welfare Department, he and a solitary personal assistant occupy a deserted office, without proper flooring or much work.

‘‘I have no comments to make,’’ a terse, grim-faced Jerome says when approached by The Indian Express.


Interestingly, even the man who transferred him does not question his achievements. ‘‘Jerome is one of the finest officers (I have seen),’’ says Karnataka Chief Minister Dharam Singh. ‘‘He has created assets for Bangalore.’’

Why then was he removed?

Jerome went on leave in a huff after the new government stayed the tenders—since cleared—for the BDA’s largest land-development project: the distribution of 20,000 house sites, for which the initial deposit money alone crossed Rs 900 crore.

Probe Singh and he becomes defensive. ‘‘He should have met me, I am his Minister,’’ argues Singh. ‘‘Instead he met the chief secretary when he decided to cut short his leave.’’

But removing Jerome was not about chief ministerial ego. Highly placed political sources said Jerome, who had taken on Bangalore’s land mafia, was removed at the insistence of former prime minister H D Deve Gowda.

During his tenure, Jerome and his A team broke the grab-and-regularise routine of a powerful mafia boasting names likes Garden George, Bullet Raja and Welder Krishna.

About 175 acres of BDA land worth Rs 700 crore was regularised. Even today, Jerome is fighting 60 court cases. Meanwhile, in a city where the exploding IT industry is running short of expansion space, land grabs are restarting. They could ruin critical BDA decongestion plans.

Jerome had finalised a peripheral road and a 10-km-long high-tech corridor. The first—the notification due in June is still not out—could permanently divert trucks from the city. The second could be a vast base for the tech industry and remove the smaller IT firms now despoiling residential neighbourhoods.

But the Jerome witch-hunt didn’t end with his transfer. In August, Gowda wrote a 29-page letter to Singh, alleging that Jerome ‘‘looted crores of rupees...flouted rules and regulations...had underhand dealings.’’

Stunned, Jerome requested permission to file a defamation case against Gowda. The government refused.

It’s a shambolic end, said anguished industry leaders like Murthy, for a bureaucrat who won a city’s acclaim. It wasn’t just CEOs. Jerome fixed the BDA’s worst problems: like reducing the 10 years it took get a sale deed—to immediate handover once payment was made.

Annual report cards and surveys done by the Public Affairs Centre, a public watchdog, indicate the transformation. To quote one finding: in 1999, only 16 per cent of citizens were “partly satisfied” with the BDA’s working. By 2003, that figure had risen to 70 per cent, with an additional 15 per cent filling a category that the BDA had never seen—‘‘fully satisfied’’.

WHAT JAYAKAR JEROME DID, WHAT DHARAM SINGH TRASHED

• Stuck for a decade, the 62-km, six-lane Outer Ring Road was finished in 8 months for Rs 182 crore, connecting all major highways and roads.
• In 10 years, the Bangalore Development Authority could sell only 3,400 sites in colonies it formed. From 2000 onwards, it sold 50,000.
• Land sale—and recovery from landgrabbers—turned a loss-making body slated for closure into a cash cow with a war-chest of Rs 1,600 crore.
• The BDA also built four flyovers, including India’s longest interchange, rejuvenated lakes, refurbished the century-old Lalbagh glass house.

BOSS-SPEAK, ONCE UPON A TIME

• ‘‘In 1999, I saw a file. BDA members had taken a resolution amongst themselves. It had become a white elephant, and they said it had to be wound up... I thought the BDA could become the vehicle to change Bangalore. I called Jerome and said I would like to give you a very challenging but depressing job. He said I have two conditions: He wanted direct access to me and he wanted no political interference. I conceded both points. In one year, the BDA became the talking point of the city.’’

S M Krishna, former Karnataka Chief Minister