Volunteer Credits: AN developed the prototype; Abhik and Nishit scaled the tool; Priti led the UX effort.

What is Civic Compass

If you’re a Bengaluru resident, you can use Civic Compass to identify the BBMP, BDA, Revenue, BESCOM, BWSSB offices, and Police offices for your area.

Access the tool here.

Why We Built This Tool

It began with a post on Reddit. Someone asked, “What’s the DRO for Koramangala?” At first, it felt like a lazy question; surely this should be easy to find. But to our horror, it wasn’t.

Bangalore Urban is split into five District Registrar Offices (DROs), but there’s no reliable way to figure out which one applies to you. The Kaveri website has a tool for this, but it doesn’t work. And even official documents like sale deeds don’t mention it.

To our surprise, and bewilderment, we also found there was no single place that helped citizens identify the offices for essential services like electricity, water, municipal ward offices and police stations for their area. So we decided to build one.

Data Sources

We pulled the information from Government records. While we strive for accuracy, these sources can sometimes be incomplete or outdated.

OpenCity

Karnataka-GIS

OpenStreetMap

Appendix – Is this information really that hard to find?

BBMP ward information

1. Offline, you can get the info by calling 1533, or looking up the Sale Deed, Property Tax receipt or Khata, but it is not a straightforward process online.
2. Sahaya app auto detects your current location and gives the appropriate ward info. But what if you are not in the same location as the property you own?
3. You can’t always ask your neighbour – if you cross the road, the ward number can change, and even Pincode. 1 Pin Code can have many wards. For example, part of DRDO is in 1 ward, another part is in another ward.  
4. In Nov ’24, around the same time we started building this tool, BBMP eAasthi portal provided a link to enter PIN code/ location and get Ward Number, Ward Name.
   1. This clarification needs to be added: Same PIN code can have many wards; 560017 shows Konena Agrahara and Ward No. 113, however entering ‘Be Water Films’ which has the same Pincode shows Vijnana Nagar Ward and Ward No. 81
5. There was a link on BBMP Home page but it is not functioning (and as of Nov 28, 2024, the site does not exist):
   • If I enter PIN code, page gets redirected to ‘Ward Committee’ page 
   • There are 198 wards and 243 wards – which one should people click on is not mentioned. Why are both data points given is not clear.
   • What should you enter in the search field – pincode or address. Don;t know because entering either does not work.
   • After choosing 243 wards, I tried adding 560017 PIN code, no info showed up for ward info. 
   • There is no PIN icon on map when you move cursor to change location. Ward Info details etc get displayed – not clear which location because the location icon is not visible. However, Officer Details still don’t get mapped. 
   • There is a tab for Officer Details: None of these display the info they are meant to display: Designation, Name, Contact No. of:
     • Elected Representatives (MP, MLA, Corporator)
     • Zone Level Officers (Zonal Commissioner, Jt Commissioner, Chief Engineer, Deputy Commissioner)
     • Ward Level Officers (Health, Revenue, SWM, Electrical, Engineering. L1,L2, L3, L4, L5)
     • Ward Committee (Nodal Officer, Secretary).  
6. If you have your ward name, you can get your ward number, and vice versa, using the following links. However these don’t help if you want to look up ward numbers using only Pin code or location.
   • This link on the BBMP website
   • Wikipedia link
   • This link also on the BBMP website gives name of nodal officer and their number.
   • This link gives Zone Info for each ward along with contact info of ARO.
     • This link again gives Division, Sub Division, Ward No, ARO contact info.
7. BBMP Delimitation 2023 site no longer exists
8. Google search gives you a list of ward office addresses. But how do you know which ward you belong to?  

District Revenue Office

There is no link that answers the question, what DRO do I fall under? This information was required to find out if eKhata was rolled-out for a certain area. There is no place to find out your DRO by giving a PIN Code or ‘Village’ name etc. 

1. If you know your Taluk, Hobli, Village details, you can find out the corresponding SROs in the Kaveri portal home page. However, this link uses ‘Bangalore Urban’ as the District.  and not the name of the Revenue Districts, so it was not useful.

2. This link also shows SRO’s in a certain revenue district, however you need to know the name of the revenue district.