Southern States - Andhra Pradesh   

Cong., BJP civic chiefs resent CM's call

By Our Staff Reporter

HYDERABAD Feb. 7. The Municipal chairmen of the Congress and the BJP are up in arms against the Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, in the wake of his call to public to gherao chairmen of civic bodies who did not deliver the goods.

At a news conference here on Friday, the convenors of Municipal chairmen and Mayors fora of the Congress and the BJP, S. Satyanarayana and J. Satyanaryana respectively, said they accepted the call of Mr. Naidu but the truth was that they worked with a lot of constraints. None of the municipalities had more than 40 per cent technical staff and most of them starved of funds, so much so that 40 bodies were unable to pay the salaries of the staff.

The Government grant to the municipal bodies out of the annual State budget of Rs. 28,000 crores was only Rs. 700 crores. If the allocation to them was to be made on the basis of population, they were entitled to at least Rs. 8,000 crores. Moreover, the Government also earned a revenue of Rs. 12,700 crores from sales tax, excise and motor vehicles tax in municipal towns.

They said the Central and State Governments had not taken even one decision to improve the municipalities in the last four years. The State took no steps to tap the City Challenge Fund and Urban Reforms Initiative Fund nor the World Bank grant of Rs. 200 crores to the civic bodies. The State also did not issue the utilisation certificates for the Swarnajayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana and National Slum Development Programme works as a result of which further advances were stopped.

They said power and water supply constituted the major expenditure of municipalities and the Government was not willing to subsidise either of them. The municipalities continued to purchase power at 100 per cent overhead although it was represented to the State Electricity Regulatory Commission to give at 20 per cent overhead.

They appealed to the Chief Minister not to link politics with development. The municipal chairmen of Ramagundam, Suryapet, Anakapalle, Nalgonda, Mahboobnagar, Guntakal, Hindupur, Kothagudem, Bobbili and Khammam were present at the press meet.

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