Thank you for signing! Let’s keep spreading to reach more and more Bengalurean's for support.” #AccountableBengaluru.

When we launched this petition, we asked for five immediate actions. Today, let’s focus on just one — a change that the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) can implement right away, within Indian law, without waiting for new legislation.

When Ravi, a resident of Jayanagar, walks past a dug-up road near his home, he wonders: “Who paid for this work? Was it finished? Why is it broken again in six months?”

“Name used is illustrative; the example is representative of many citizen experiences in Bengaluru.”

The truth is, Ravi has no way of knowing. Like lakhs of Bengalureans, he pays his taxes, but once the money leaves his pocket, it disappears into a black box of government accounts.

This is exactly why we launched this petition. When we asked for five immediate actions, one stood out as the simplest, most urgent, and most powerful: open procurement and payments, open trust.

Today, citizens rarely know who got paid for which work, and whether that work was ever completed. This lack of visibility allows fraud, double billing, and ghost projects. A live payments portal would change everything, giving both citizens and auditors a way to see, in real time, how money flows ward by ward.

The important thing is that this does not require any new law. The Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurements Act of 1999 already mandates that tenders be public. The RTI Act of 2005 requires proactive disclosure of financial information. Even BBMP itself experimented with such portals years ago. The groundwork exists; it only needs to be implemented properly.

The solution is straightforward. First, connect the state treasury system, Khajane-II, the GBA ledger (One Ledger, Five Corporations) with a new GBA portal, tagging every payment with ward ID, contractor name, and project reference. Second, require each of the five corporations to upload payments within thirty days of release. Finally, make this data accessible through a single public portal where payments can be searched by ward or contractor.

But Bengaluru deserves more than just another government site that launches with fanfare, only to crash, remain broken, or quietly vanish. The new system must be reliable and trustworthy. That means mandating high uptime with vendor penalties, hosting on secure state infrastructure such as the NIC cloud or the State Data Centre, and ensuring every payment is digitally signed and time stamped. It means providing monthly downloadable records so data cannot be lost, setting up ward-level displays and kiosks with QR codes linking to the portal, and commissioning annual independent audits. It also requires a dedicated IT cell within GBA to watch uptime dashboards in real time.

If this happens, citizens like Ravi will finally know how their money is being spent. Contractors will no longer be able to hide ghost payments. And GBA will begin its first year by building the one thing Bengaluru has long needed: transparency.

This is not about creating new laws or waiting for more committees. It is about using the tools and legal provisions that already exist. If GBA acts on even this single step, the city’s governance reset will finally feel real, and transparency will become a practice rather than a slogan.