From CITB to BDA, has the agency delivered on its objectives?
The Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) remains a key agency for residents’ homeownership dreams despite being maligned over the years on corruption charges. The authority, which started in 1976, has turned 50 years old.
Before the BDA, there was the City Improvement Trust Board (CITB), a colonial institution with roots in the 19th-century plague and focused on improving sanitation. While cities like Mumbai, Kolkata and Mysuru got their CITBs in the early 20th century, Bengaluru was a late entrant with the CITB established in 1945 after the plague ravaged the city in the 1890s.
Bengaluru responded to the plague with the planned settlements of Basavanagudi and Malleswaram. One of CITB’s greatest achievements was Jayanagar, which was the largest planned layout in Asia at the time.
Convert CITB to BDA
But all was not well. Historian Janaki Nair, author The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth CenturyHe said there were numerous illegal settlement schemes that mushroomed in the city in the 1970s and were regularized through a “redistribution scheme”.
“There was still a belief that this process could be corrected, that it could be regulated a little better than what was happening. For this purpose, then Prime Minister D. Devaraj Urs established the BDA,” he said.
Dissolving the earlier Bangalore City Improvement Trust Board (CITB), Urs established the BDA by a special law in 1976. Former bureaucrat Chiranjiv Singh, the then General Secretary of Urs, recalled that the rapid growth of the city was felt and there was a need for planned and orderly development to channelize this. Thus, BDA was created on the lines of Delhi Development Authority (DDA).
While CITB was tasked with the housing function overlapping with the Housing Board, planning was the purview of the Bangalore Urban Planning Authority. For the first time, BDA brought development and planning functions under one roof. The BDA, through its planning functions, was also the regulator of the city’s development.
However, BDA is still mostly known for its layouts. CITB and BDA have developed nearly 70 well-planned layouts. BDA has also introduced lottery system for allotment of seats due to high demand; This arose well in breaking the caste-based discrimination that had marked earlier settlement schemes and created the city’s first truly mixed settlement after the PSU housing colonies.
A BDA site still looms large in the city’s imagination, but recent litigation-ridden layouts and delays in providing infrastructure have undermined its singular status. However, many argued that the BDA had turned into a “real estate developer”, building layouts where land was available and areas were profitable. BDA not only caters to the middle and upper middle classes with its layouts, but has also been accused of failing to develop layouts that suit the city’s economic geographies.
How about planning?
But has the BDA achieved its goal of checking unplanned development and mushrooming of illegal settlements and development?
“Time has shown that the BDA has in fact not only failed to control illegal and unplanned development but has also developed it in many ways,” Ms Nair said. “Perhaps when Urs started BDA, the real estate market in Bengaluru was well developed. The stable doors were closing after the horses ran away,” he said.
“The state appears to be able to meet the housing needs of all people only by allowing illegalities and its temporary regulation. In many respects, planning is to produce the unplanned. In BDA, as planning and development came together, development undermined planning and development was handed over to a number of private players, including house building cooperatives, of which BDA was just one,” Ms Nair said.
Film and television director TN Seetharam recalls how farmer leader MD Nanjundaswamy dragged them into a three-day protest at Cubbon Park in 1976 against the formation of the BDA.
In a Facebook post, the day the Urs government announced the establishment of BDA, Prof. He recalled that MDN asked him when he would reach Gandhi Bazaar from Malleswaram and when he replied 15 minutes, he said everyone would buy a car and in the next five years it would take half an hour. He said the sites would cost more than Rs 30 lakh over five years. “We staged a protest at Cubbon Park for two days and demanded a Bangalore Maintenance Authority instead, arguing that the city has already grown enough but no one cares. Today, the journey from Malleswaram to Gandhi Bazaar takes around 1.5 hours,” he said.
It was published – 17 January 2026 07:00 IST
