In protest against the denial to submit adjournment and calling attention motions, councillors belonging to the opposition Congress-Indian Union Mulsim League (IUML) combine and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) boycotted an online meeting of the Kozhikode City Corporation Council held on Tuesday.
At the same time, the ruling Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI-M]-led Left Democratic Front adopted the agenda for the day in less than an hour. However, some items on the agenda that required detailed discussions were kept aside for the next council meeting.
The United Democratic Front members said that there was no point in participating in a council meeting without presenting issues affecting the citizens. However, BJP members, who attended the online meeting initially, boycotted the proceedings after Mayor Beena Philip refused the party leader T. Raneesh to present an adjournment motion.
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Mr. Raneesh said that serious issues such as the surge in COVID-19 cases needed to be discussed in the council meeting. Certainly, it was not right to deny permission to present an adjournment motion in this regard, he said.
However, the Mayor responded saying that a high-level committee would be summoned the next day to discuss the COVID-19 situation.
UDF party leader K.C. Shobitha and deputy reader K. Moideen Koya said that their members had boycotted the council meeting after the Mayor declined to give permission to discuss the issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and the shortage of medicines in government hospitals. Ms. Shobitha of the Congress said that the police had slapped cases on the rallies organised by opposition parties but no cases were registered against the CPI(M), which had organised a bigger public meeting in connection with its party district conference on the beach.
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Another Congress member, P. Ushadevi, said that she wanted to present a calling attention motion pertaining to the irregularities unearthed by the Vigilance department in the corporation office. The UDF councillors also accused the corporation authorities of giving permission to conduct the election to the Kudumbashree Mission during the pandemic. However, permission was refused to conduct a meeting of 75 council members, they said.
Henceforth, household waste collected by the Haritha Karma Sena from the corporation limits will no longer be taken to the Njeliyanparambu waste treatment unit. This was because the Malabar Waste Management Private Limited, a special purpose vehicle of the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC), had requested that the site be cleared as construction of the waste-to-energy plant at Njeliyanparamba was in progress.
The waste-to-energy plant will be set up on 12.67 acres of corporation land. The ₹250-crore project is expected to process around 450 tonnes of solid waste and create 6 MW of electricity per day.
Meanwhile, the corporation has allotted 20 days to Niravu Vengeri to clear the existing waste from Njeliyanparamba.