India's technology capital has, for most of the last six years, had no elected municipal council at all. It is the clearest case the firm knows of a city that is short of neither money nor capability, and still loses delivery.
Bengaluru is where the firm's argument is easiest to demonstrate, because the city is not short of money, capacity or ambition — and still loses delivery at the tier nobody campaigns on.
224 Assembly constituencies; 28 Lok Sabha seats. Karnataka's Assembly went to the polls in May 2023 and its term runs to 2028. This is a state that has changed governing party repeatedly and rewards a competently argued case; it is not a terrain where incumbency alone carries a cycle.
Bengaluru's urban seats behave differently from the rest of the state — a distinct turnout profile, a distinct migrant and tenant share, and a voter whose complaint is a service failure rather than an entitlement gap. A single state-wide argument that ignores that split underperforms in the city and hopes to be rescued elsewhere.
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike ran without an elected council after its term expired in September 2020 — the country's technology capital governed by administrator for years, with the ward committees that the 74th Amendment envisaged as the delivery tier largely dormant. The Greater Bengaluru Governance Act has since replaced the single corporation with several under a Greater Bengaluru Authority, which is a serious attempt at the problem and also a fresh one: a new statute creates new bodies, and new bodies begin with no published record.
That is the specific opportunity here. A city corporation at the moment of its constitution can be given what almost no Indian municipal body has: a named owner per service, a dated target, and a monthly published number. Retrofitting that onto a forty-year-old body is far harder than building it in at the start.