Mangalore, December 24: The general body meeting of the Dakshina Kannada Zilla Panchayat convened on Friday turned out to be another exercise in futility. It was to discuss important issue of meeting the deadline laid by the Chief Minister for filling potholes n the district. But the meeting ended up in blame game on less-important issues.
A member's complaint that officials did not recognise her presence on stage during a programme, ate away quality time on irrelevant discussion during the general body meeting of Dakshina Kannada Zilla Panchayat on Friday.
Though the ZP President Shailaja Bhat had announced right in the beginning of the meeting that the members should concentrate on the agenda and stick to the point during the discussion so that the meeting could complete the business, members deviated from developmental issues, resorting into arguments and counter arguments to ensure that they have done their bit to save the prestige of their respective parties.
Congress members Mamata Gatti, M S Mohommad and others said that despite ZP completing 10 months of its existence, it has failed to implement any major work because of paucity of funds. Raged by this ruling party members Santhosh Kumar Rai, Chanappa Kotian and others said that the Congress members are making baseless allegations because many of the members have got about Rs one crore each to carry on development works. Taking this as an injustice meted out at them, the Congress members said that only ruling party members can claim of getting 'crores' of rupees for taking up work because Congress party members have not received any money.
Soon the discussion took the 'party colour' with the Centre, the State, the CM, MLAs all being pulled into the discussion. However, ZP Chief putting an end to the discussion, which had gone haywire, asked the ZP Engineering Department to take up road repair works at the earliest. She said that she would personally inspect each and every work.
Senior member Yashwanthi Alva, making way for yet another discussion said that during one of the programmes of Mangalore Taluk Panchayat she was sidelined and insulted by the officials who did not recognize her presence on the stage. Members Mamata Gatti, Mohommad, Saraswathi Kamat and others said that it is time members took the issue seriously because such incidents of sidelining ZP members had happened even in the past.
“Let ZP Chief supercede the Taluk Panchayat concerned,” said a member while another member said that ZP CEO should issue notice to faulty officials. However, the prolonged altercation around Yashwanthi Alva who was crying in front of the house ended almost after an hour. Due to this issue, an important discussion on setting up of Rajiv Gandhi Seva Kendras in the district was abruptly ended.
However, it was heard from various quarters that it was unbecoming of ZP members to take up irrelevant discussions at a crucial juncture of time when most of the GPs in the district are facing problems like acute shortage of drinking water, bad roads, closure of schools etc.
The ZP meet decided to hold a special meeting within ten days to discuss over various issues pertaining to the Revenue department. Members informed the house that the surveyors have not been coming to survey the land and there are lot of problem pertaining to distribution of widow pension, disabled allowances etc. Summing all the problems related to Revenue department, the ZP decided to convene a meeting to sort out issues.
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