Delimitation of wards draws flak from public

Coimbatore: The public as well as political parties are flaying the city corporation on the delimitation of wards after it failed to consider the suggestions and objections while finalising the boundaries.
Changing the boundaries of wards based on its population, the state government had recently notified the delimitation of all the 100 wards in the government gazette. The borders were redrawn in such a way that each ward has a minimum population of 15,847 with a minimum of 10% deviation. The exercise was done based on the 2011 census, according to which, population of Coimbatore city was 15,84,719.

In a meeting headed by the district collector in January, several objections were raised pertaining to the delimitation. But not even one objection was taken into account, Singanallur MLA N Karthik said. “The corporation has divided ward 75 in such a way that a part of it belongs to the Singanallur constituency and other part to Thondamuthur constituency. Before the delimitation, the entire ward belonged to Singanallur constituency. Similarly, a part of a ward in Coimbatore South constituency was merged with Singanallur constituency,” he said. “How can I use the MLA fund and execute a developmental work in one part of the ward and leave out the other?”

SM Samy, a former counsellor, said that Bharathi Nagar, which belonged to ward 37, was merged with ward 56, which is over 3km away. “All the 30 areas in between the wards and Avinashi Road belong to some other ward,” he told TOI.

Explaining that there are over 50,000 households in slums in the city, Samy said that there is no mention of even a single slum in the report. “It will definitely cause confusion when the slum is located on the border of two wards.”

Earlier, Ramalinga Colony in RS Puram was in the western zone and the zonal office was just half-a-kilometre away, said AP Jose, president of the Ramalinga Colony Residential Welfare Association. “But, now the corporation has included the colony in the central zonal and the zonal office is kilometres away. Residents will have to travel a long distance to pay property tax and other charges.”

Once the report is finalized, ideally the corporation should invite objections from the public and give them 15 days to raise objections, J James, west zone secretary of CPI said. “But, we came to know about it from newspapers only a couple of days ago and the last day was on Saturday. It is more like the corporation officials acting deliberately to avoid objections. The entire process lacked transparency.”