BANGALORE: With Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy all set to announce a "vision statement" for Bangalore on Saturday during a workshop on "Bangalore Today and Tomorrow", it will be a challenging year ahead for the city's service providers.

On Saturday, nine civic agencies, including the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), the organising agency of the workshop, will highlight the development projects planned for the next one year. They will also make short presentations on the progress made over the past year.

Apart from BBMP and BDA, agencies such as the Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority (BMRDA), Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), Bangalore Electricity Supply Company (BESCOM), Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Limited (BMRCL), Karnataka Housing Board (KHB) and Bangalore city police will participate in the workshop.

The KHB will make a special presentation on housing for the urban poor under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).

The Government plans to build more than 5,000 houses for slum dwellers in the next one year.

A photo and panel exhibition to display models of various projects taken up by the agencies has also been organised at the Jnana Jyothi auditorium on the Central College premises, the venue of the workshop.

The workshop whose theme is "Bangalore-Well Known, Still Young" will see the Chief Minister and officials of these agencies interacting with citizens, industrialists, students, litterateurs, NGOs, heads of some reputed corporates in the city and student leaders from select schools and colleges.

Official sources in the BDA told The Hindu on Friday that the event would be similar to the annual summits of the erstwhile Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF), where civic agencies interacted with the stakeholders.

The BATF, comprising heads of reputed corporates in Bangalore, was active when S.M. Krishna was the Chief Minister. The organisation has the credit of enabling civic agencies to adopt "best practices" in their functioning.

The civic agencies had been collecting the views of the general public for the programme for the past one week. People whose responses were worth considering were being invited for the meeting, the sources added.

The Chief Minister along with top officials inspected the preparations for the workshop on Friday.

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