After ignoring Bengaluru city in the first two years of its term and facing criticism for doing so, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah's government went into overdrive on matters concerning it. But all it managed over the next two years is a series of missteps -whether it was the badly planned Akrama-Sakrama scheme or the plan to divide the city into five corporations, or the idea of common zoning regulations. Fortunately, none of them has come to fruition so far, thanks to the courts and strong resistance from citizens. The common thread in all of them is the lack of vision or concern for the city's future, haphazard planning and sometimes, regrettably, a brazen attempt to pander to vested interests. But the streak of bad ideas seems to be continuing, with the latest being a uniform municipal legislation for Bengaluru and the rest of urban Karnataka. 

The government's justification for a common urban legislation is that it will enable the state to get more central grants and attract more investment by increasing the ease of doing business. Those are misconceptions.

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