“Kivi mele hoovu? (Do you think I am sitting here with flowers in my ears?)” he asked rhetorically (a Kannada idiom that means “do you think I am an idiot”). A lot of money had been spent over the years on neutering dogs. If the results were subpar, this would have to be reviewed. But it needed data that officials were unable to provide.
He has also undertaken a drive to reclaim Bengaluru’s footpaths. Many lives were lost along busier roads and highways following encroachment by roadside vendors, forcing pedestrians to walk on the road. “The whole of the inner city is yours to ply your trade. I will not have pedestrians paying with their lives,” he told vendors, an important political constituency in Bengaluru. Around 500 km of footpaths have been cleared of encroachment. He suspended an officer and fined a contractor for substandard road repair and warned that more such action would follow.
He has set up the Greater Bengaluru Authority Executive Committee as a permanent mechanism, supported by a unified Geographic Information System-based digital platform that brings together all major civic agencies for coordinated planning and execution. This could address one of Bengaluru’s oldest governance failures — the chronic lack of coordination among departments. Both Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and TV Mohandas Pai, dedicated and trenchant critics of the government, have publicly applauded Krishna for his efforts. Bengaluru, the once gracious and verdant city now in danger of being reduced to an overgrown slum, might have a real champion in Krishna Byre Gowda.
In politics for more than 25 years, he has held his current constituency, Byatarayanapura, a segment of the Bangalore North Lok Sabha constituency, since 2008. Krishna is an educated, urbane Gowda — from the Vokkaliga caste, known for its social and political influence in Karnataka. He went to an American university, has a management degree, ran a banana plantation in Kolar for a while, but took over the constituency when his father died in 2003, later moving to Byatarayanapura, a semi-urban semi-rural Assembly constituency. Because of his understanding of agrarian realities, during the pandemic, he helped farmers — in his constituency as well as Kolar — move their crops to markets during lockdown. He has been a bitter critic of the Union government’s management of the pandemic. He launched the advocacy of millets and ragi much before Prime Minister Narendra Modi did. To his credit, he has never crowed about this.
Though the complexities of caste politics in the state put former chief minister Siddaramaiah in a delicate position as regards the Vokkaligas, he does have a soft spot for Krishna. Though Mr Siddaramaiah as chief minister held the finance portfolio, he appointed Krishna his agriculture minister and later revenue minister. As minister for agriculture, Krishna was sent to New Delhi as Karnataka’s representative in negotiations on goods and services tax (GST). Karnataka is home to diverse industries, from manufacturing to technology services, with its own unique GST issues. Both then-Union minister Arun Jaitley and Secretary Hasmukh Adhia publicly lavished praise for the bipartisan way Krishna handled GST. It was not about politics. It was about people, a bureaucrat said.
Krishna could get away with this because of his strong connection with Rahul Gandhi, whose Bharat Jodo padayatra (2022) he had in part organised. Rival Congressmen sneer at his education and urban profile sometimes. But Krishna represents a quiet change in the Congress — a trend towards governance model-led politics, which could become the party’s most compelling political narrative and a leitmotif for credibility.
Because of his strong links with Mr Siddaramaiah, Mr Shivakumar and other colleagues view him with a degree of suspicion. Though he was made minister for Bengaluru, the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and Bengaluru Metropolitan Region Development Authority (BMRDA) were not included in his portfolio. He made his disapproval publicly known, reminding everyone who was listening that the chief minister and the high command would no doubt intervene. But he hasn’t let that come in the way of his work. The city is watching his moves closely. As he himself observed: “If Bengaluru fails, Karnataka fails.”
 "Krishna Byre Gowda")