However, as the city grew and I settled here, watching flyovers replace trees, buses riding over potholes, I started to see Bengaluru differently. The city that held its breath during the lockdown appeared to be holding it again, but this time because the air was thick with pollutants and the parks were packed with people. As an economics student, I could not resist asking: Where does the city spend all its money? What types of expenditures are accounted for in a city budget, and most importantly, do the city budgets cater to climate change?
This curiosity led me to examine Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagra Palike(BBMP) budget documents from 2019 to 2024. This five-year period depicts the city’s transition and reveals Bengaluru's climate resilience strategy. On paper, BBMP spends on ‘climate-relevant’ areas, such as parks, health, stormwater drainageand more. However, the pattern is erratic and disjointed.
Take rainwater harvesting, for instance, it is one of the few proactive interventions adopted across all wards. Yet the budget allocations fluctuate sharply from ₹ 500 lakh in 2019–20 to ₹ 548 lakh in 2023–24, including reductions in-between. These fluctuations suggest responses to immediate concerns, such as water stress, rather than a long-term climate plan.
Solid Waste Management shows a similar pattern as the city generates thousands of tonnes of waste every day, leaving gaps between waste generated and waste processed. Yet, the spending moved randomly, ₹6,100 lakh in 2019–20 to ₹452.57 lakh in 2021–22 before soaring once more to ₹6,904 lakh in 2023–24. This appears like a crisis-driven sector, when for a city of this size, consistent investment is crucial.
This inconsistency spills into Underground Drainage as well. In 2020–21 and 2021–22, BBMP allocated ₹700 lakh and ₹604 lakh, respectively. The following year, this category disappeared. In a city that experiences sewage overflows and floods every monsoon, this sporadic focus demonstrates how climate-linked infrastructure is viewed as a short-term endeavour rather than a long-term goal.
The most interesting segment of the BBMP budget data was the volatility of the public health budget. In 2020-21, the spending peaked at ₹10,480 lakh, then stabilised in the following years. Much of the post-pandemic health spending went towards mosquito control programmes, sanitation work, and prevention of vector-borne diseases. Recent scholarly papers mention rising temperature, stagnant water, and changing rainfall patterns as certain reasons for these disease outbreaks. Yet, Bengaluru's actual adaptation efforts are still concealed from view since such expenditure is not classified under ‘environment’ or ‘climate action’.
In contrast, horticulture and urban forestry saw substantial increases, from ₹7,990 lakh in 2020–21 to nearly ₹43,000 lakh in 2022–23. While this is a positive outlook for a city once known as the ‘Garden City’, the issue of transparency remains. Budget lines often combine park development with unrelated items, like beautification or installations, making it unclear how much money truly supports parks and urban forestry, which is an essential defence against air pollution and heat.
One of the biggest challenges in reading the BBMP budget documents was navigating how expenditures are grouped. Road, drainage, and walkway projects are grouped together; park upkeep is grouped with security services; and waste management is categorised under several headings and partially under 14th Finance Commission funds. This makes it difficult to assess how much Bengaluru actually spends on climate resilience.
This matters because climate risks in cities are interconnected. Budgets cannot regard floods, heat waves, water shortagesand disease outbreaks as separate issues since they do not occur in isolation. Governance is reflected in each city’s budget dispersal. Looking at these budget estimates, I notice contradictions – a city that develops flyovers more quickly than it improves drainage; a city that spends a lot of money on medical crises without addressing environmental reasons; a city that waters its gardens but has trouble constructing/maintaining stormwater drains. We were reminded of the importance of open spaces and pure air by the epidemic. The years that have passed have demonstrated how quickly that is forgotten in the absence of systemic reform.
The state government launched the Bengaluru Climate Action and Resilience Plan in 2023, which has a monitoring, evaluation, reporting and learning coordination system across energy, transport, waste, water, air quality, urban planning and many other departments. The Climate Action Cell followed in 2024 to oversee budget allocation within departments and funding resilience projects. With the recent dissolution of the BBMP, Bengaluru is now organised into five administrative divisions. The key question now is whether this change will lead to improved governance or simply create more layers of administration.
Ananya Senapati is a postgraduate student of Economics at Azim Premji University.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or the positions of the organisation they represent.
