The Gandhinagar Senior Citizens’ Forum has demanded immediate rollback of privatisation of sanitation and streetlight maintenance work of the city by the Brahmapur Municipal Corporation (BeMC).
Most of the private agencies to which the sanitation and electrical maintenance work of the city has been entrusted are openly cheating the denizens and looting crores of rupees from the public exchequer without any service on the ground and no one is being made accountable, he stated.
He demanded stringent action against the firm as well as the BeMC administration for paying deaf ears to tax payers’ repeated demand.
Citing examples of poor and superfluous sanitation work of the city in general and Gandhinagar in particular, the forum alleged that the BeMC Commissioner and Health Officer never move beyond their AC chambers to take stock of the situation.
The condition of roads and drains is deplorable as they are packed with solid wastes, soils and garbage to which the BeMC and the district administration hasdeliberately ignored.
Debris and construction materials are being dumped on the drains as well as on the public road covering 50 per cent of the space which surprisingly goes unnoticed by the BeMC in spite of repeated reminders. The contractors pay attention to the main roads just for an eye wash and to appease the BeMC authorities, where as the interior lanes/streets of the city in particular are ignored and go unattended.
Even some denizens have used public road openly as cowshed in Gandhinagar 3rd Lane causing inconvenience to the public and helping to breed mosquitoes.
Several representations, telephone calls, complaints to the BeMC remain unheeded apparently owning to a nexus between the contractors and the BeMC.
In spite of the media reports and repeated complaints, neither the BeMC Commissioner nor the Health Officer has ever visited the site to address the public grievances nor met the complainants ever. Some local public, mostly senior citizens, apprehending threat perceptions do not dare to file complaints before the BeMC knowing well that their demand will remain unheeded.
Similarly, the day to day electrical maintenance work of the area has grossly deteriorated since the work has been given to a Delhi-based private firm, Neev Energy. Several streetlight points are currently defunct and never been checked.
According to information available, the State UD Department represented by the BeMC entered in to an agreement with the
Delhi-based firm Neev since January 2018for day to day electrical maintenance work initially for 7,000 light points which was subsequently increased to 12,000 light pointsreportedly without revision of payment.
Due to some controversy and lack of specificity on the mode of work procedure and clarity in clauses, the UD Department has reportedly withheld the payment worth Rs1.5 crore to the firm for which the firm is not able to carry out the work, sources said.
Likewise, every day senior citizens go with a complaint to make their light points functional but there is no one to addresstheir grievances. The senior citizens of the area have demanded that, the BeMC administration be made accountable for such maintenance lapses in public interest.Forum also demanded that owners who kept their plots in posh localities of the city vacant without compound walls be served notice to make boundary walls.
Similarly, the BeMC should initiate action against those who dump construction materials and debris on the public road that remain un-lifted for months and those who use public road as their cow-shed should be imposed exemplary penalty so that they will not dare repeat the same.
The forum also made the elected representatives responsible for such mess pointing out their failure to put pressure on the BeMC.