The Thiruvananthapuram city Corporation council passed an action plan for pre-monsoon cleanup activities at a special meeting convened on Monday. Councillors of the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) staged separate walkouts during the meeting, prompting Mayor Arya Rajendran to say that the Opposition councillors appeared confident that the civic body administration will take up all the required steps for clean-up activities in their respective wards, even in their absence.
The pre-monsoon cleaning action plan chalks out the activities to be taken up ahead of the south-west monsoon in June as well as the north-east monsoon in October. The action plan was delayed this year due to the Lok Sabha elections.
‘No resolution passed’
As soon as the meeting began, BJP councillors rose up in protest claiming that the Corporation was wrong in passing a resolution demanding the suspension of Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) driver H.L.Yadhu, involved in a tiff with the Mayor. However, the Mayor asserted that no such resolution was passed and slammed a section of the mainstream media for putting out fake news and refusing to correct it even when a clarification was issued from the Mayor’s office. The BJP councillors staged a walkout over the issue. The UDF councillors also walked out at the fag end of the meeting over a discussion on the same issue.
Though the UDF councillors continued to participate in the discussions on the action plan, the councillors directed criticism at the Mayor, leading to shouting matches with Left Democratic Front (LDF) councillors. UDF councillor P. Padmakumar said that the Corporation’s pre-monsoon cleaning had failed last year, and demanded that allocation per ward be increased from ₹1 lakh to ₹3 lakh.
The Mayor said that the Corporation’s objective in the current year will be to prevent water-logging even when high intensity unseasonal rain happens, as it occurred during October last year. The Corporation plans to take up a total of 985 works this year as part of pre-monsoon cleaning across the city. Out of this, 32 works have already been completed, while some are set to start immediately. Councillors have been given permission to procure or rent equipment needed for clean-up. Responding to the demand for increased outlay, she said that ₹1 lakh more spending in each ward will be considered in the second phase of clean-up.
The campaign will begin this week with the ward-level sanitation committees mapping the condition of waterbodies in their respective areas and identifying areas that need to be cleaned up. Clusters of 50 houses each will be formed in all wards and sanitation squads will be deployed for each cluster. Activities, including fogging to control the spread of vector-borne diseases, will be taken up in areas which have been identified as dengue hotspots in the past two years.
