Mumbai corporators’ performance falls: Report

MUMBAI: What were the issues that troubled you most this year — bad roads, frequent fires at the Deonar dump yard, poor desilting work, monsoon flooding and rising TB deaths?

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And what did our elected representatives discuss? The renaming of roads, chowks and monuments, according to a report by the NGO Praja on Mumbai’s corporators. The report evaluates corporators using parameters such as attendance, the kind of questions they asked in meetings, their criminal record and whether citizens found them accessible. The report found that only 30% of the issues the corporators discussed were related to citizens’ complaints.

For instance, 25,067 people died from TB between April 2012 and March 2016, but our elected representatives asked just 39 questions about it this year.

On potholes — an issue that draws several complaints from citizens every day— there were only 38 questions. Just nine questions were asked after the Deonar disaster. On the other hand, the report showed corporators asked 374 questions about renaming roads. Further, 10 corporators did not ask a single question in the past year.

Based on the parameters, the report said the average performance score of the 227 corporators was 62.01% in 2016 — a 3.41% rise from 2013. But their attendance fell in various committee meetings, from 80.6% in 2013 to 71.2% in 2016.

“The problem is with the number of questions asked across these meetings, which was just 2,933. And even here, one out of every eight questions dealt with the issue of renaming of roads and chowks,” said Nitai Mehta, the managing trustee of Praja.

The report also showed citizens’ complaints took 13 days to be solved, when they should have been addressed in three. With just a few months to go for the 2017 polls, accessibility of representatives should be rising, but the report showed it fell from 51.8% last year to 45.5% in 2016.

With six corporators of the BMC handling dual roles, their performance had deteriorated, the report said.

Milind Mhaske, project director of Praja, said, “The government should think about not allowing multiple representation of citizens by one person as they cannot perform dual roles and one role is compromised.”