Regardless of regular complaint of continuous extortion, intimidation and havoc created by the members of enforcement team of Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) habitually, the civic body officials appear feeble in controlling this. The recent controversy where the enforcement team members created ruckus at a confectionary shop demanding hefty bribe has again raised a question on their monitoring and functioning.
Despite repeated attempts of e-rickshaw drivers, street vendors and others over this issue, the authorities never took an action against the rowdy enforcement team staffs. Taking example of a recent controversy, no stern action was taken by the authorities to teach the errant enforcement cell officers a lesson.
The officials of RMC easily got out of it by merely suspending their powers for a while and relegating the enforcement cell officers’ post. Taking into account, lack of evidence issue, the team members that got into uproar will serve as the ward supervisors for some time.
More than nine teams are working in the RMC enforcement cell at present. Considering the safety issue including maintenance of evidence, earlier besides expanding the enforcement cell, the members were supposed to put button cameras while conducting any official proceedings on the spots.
However, the civic body has not even moved an inch towards this direction which could have proved helpful in preventing such untoward incidents. Moreover, even now, none of the municipal corporation officials seems really concerned about the monitoring aspect of this wing.
Additional Municipal Commissioner (AMC) and RMC Officer (Health), Dr. Kiran Kumari, the nodal officers were not available to comment on the increasing cases of charges against the enforcement cell and the measures being taken up by them to handle this mismanagement.
RMC Officer (PR), Naresh Kumar Sinha, said, “The municipal corporation has taken the issue of enforcement team members seriously. Officials serving as the members of enforcement cell have been warned and have been instructed to improve their conduct while carrying out their duties.”
The constitution of enforcement team was done with a vision to assist the existing workforce of the municipal corporation which was earlier toiling hard on different frontages in managing the city chores like sanitation, encroachment etc while keeping a tab on the defaulters. Though deployment of the members in enforcement team added human resource to the existing number of staffs, but again, with every passing day, the complaint cases have considerably increased against them. In addition, over the issue of sensitization of enforcement cell officers and button-cameras procurement, a City Manager, Ambuj Singh who is leading the enforcement cell, said, “The municipal corporation will soon purchase the button cameras as per the requirements. All proceedings regarding this have been cleared.”
Besides demanding bribes during the checking drives, while conducting surveys, removing encroachments, reports of manhandling, misbehaviour has hit the headlines several times. In the absence of stringent monitoring system, several cases have also gone unreported in the past as well.