Disconnect among corporators, BMC & citizens, claims survey

There is a "total disconnect" between the people's representatives, municipal administration and the citizens over Mumbai's civic problems, a city-based NGO today claimed.
Praja Foundation, which works on civic issues, today released a report on the complaints filed by the citizens and corporations' evaluations in all the 17 ward committees, during the period of March 2012 and December 2015.
"On the basis of figures that we obtained through RTI queries in the departments concerned of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), we found that there is complete disengagement between the people's representatives, civic authorities and citizens and this is because representatives don't care for commom man," said Nitai Mehta, Managing Trustee of Praja Foundation, said.

"This report card reveals that there is a missing link between the work of the elected representatives and the quality of governance in Mumbai. The recent Deonar dumping ground fire is a live example of what is going on in our city," he said.
The report also said that the number of complaints regarding roads and potholes were maximum during this period, followed by those pertaining to drainage and water supply.
The report, however, showed that there was improvement in some areas of civic administration as the average days taken by the BMC to resolve the complaints came down to 13 days in 2015 from 17 days in 2014. "This is not bad at all and the civic body is definitely improving in many ways," Mehta said.

On the 'point of order' questions asked by the corporators, he said, "The average number of days taken to answer such questions have been 128 days in the last 4 years. While 91 per cent of the corporators asked less than 10 questions in ward committee meetings in the last four years."
Seeking a proper channel for people to raise their civic issues, another senior associate of the Foundation, Milind Mhaske said, "Functioning of ward committees needs to be seriously improved. Councillors need to study civic issues pertaining to their constituency, then prepare agendas and push these in the committee meetings in a planned manner."

The administration also needs to start taking point of order questions seriously, and answer them prominently, he said adding, "For there to be some concrete change, the administration needs to change from within, which can only happen when it becomes pro-active and embrace good governance practices.