KhoobSurat drive skin deep, fear corporators

MUMBAI, June 8: It's the ugly side of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's ambitious KhoobSurat drive. Critics say Mayor Vishakha Raut's at...

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MUMBAI, June 8: It’s the ugly side of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s ambitious KhoobSurat drive. Critics say Mayor Vishakha Raut’s attempt to emulate the example set by Surat may well be creating small Calcuttas in the city.

Alarmed standing committee members on Saturday pointed out that choked gutters, uncleared garbage bins, leaking water mains and dirty roads have become common in the city. For this, they blamed the civic body’s preoccupation with the KhoobSurat drive. “With a large number of civic employees engaged in the drive, routine work is getting ignored,” said a member.

A full-fledged debate on the issue followed in the standing committee meeting after Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rajesh Sharma moved a point-of-order.Corporators cutting across party lines pointed out that public complaints were not being attended to promptly, with the result that in some wards even broken water mains remained unattended for days together. “A special drive should be no reason to ignore routine work,” said a corporator.

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Shiv Sena leader Nandu Satam told the committee that the drive, which was launched in May this year, did very well initially, but was gradually losing momentum. “While we are fining people for littering, garbage bins are overflowing…it won’t be long before people saw the contradiction.” He also stressed the importance of providing facilities like dustbins at public places.

Satam said BMC needed to recruit more staff to keep the drive going. “Adequate staff would also reduce interruptions in routine work.” he reasoned.

Making his displeasure with the drive obvious, the committee chairman, Sardar Tara Singh, alleged the officers were fining people according to their whims and fancies. He also criticised builders for dumping construction material in drains. Additional Municipal Commissioner V R Ramani told the members that builders responsible for choked drains would be punished.

While he refused to admit that his officers were unreasonable while fining offenders, he said the idea behind the policy of each officer collecting a minimum amount in fines was to keep a tab on their functioning.

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He added that the main concern of the corporation was how to educate the slum-dwellers.