MADURAI
Blaming the State government for “being a stumbling block” to the conduct of local body election, despite a Madras High Court directive, DMK IT Wing secretary and MLA P.T.R. Palanivel Thiagarajan has said this has put many development projects in cold storage.
The absence of elected representatives in the local bodies for about 15 months had paralysed the functioning of a democratic system. Officers held additional charge in local bodies for several months against law.
In many corporation wards, works were not taken up. Absence of elected representatives had made several officials to act independently. There was no accountability to the people and the expenditure by the administrators, he said.
Mr. Thiagarajan said the AIADMK government did not seem to be keen on conducting the polls in the near future. The government and the authorities concerned chose to find lame excuses and postpone the elections, he charged.
Stressing the importance of having elected representatives and redrafting corporation ward composition, Mr. Thiagarajan said in his constituency (Madurai Central), for example, there were 22 wards and the population in each ward varied from 4,000 to 22,000. For a city like Madurai, a ward should ideally have a population of 11,500.
Though the officials were taking stock of the population based on the 2011 census, the MLA said, there were huge differences between the figures obtained in 2011 and the current figures.
For instance, in ward 71, the voters population had increased from 12,700 in 2011 to 17,092 in 2016 – a 34% jump. In each ward, there were huge differences. Hence, it was important to devise a mechanism which should be acceptable to all and transparent for the redrafting work, he said.
