Tirupur city corporation draws flak for passing 2019-‘20 budget secretly

Tirupur: It’s time you know that the city corporation had already passed the annual budget for 2019-20. Like the public, other stakeholders too were in the dark about it. It’s the fourth straight year when the city corporation presented the budget in the absence of council.
The budget was passed on February 18, but the civic body didn’t even care to reveal it to local MLA or its own public relations officer. Though corporation commissioner K Sivakumar said they had uploaded the budget announcements on their official website, a search by TOI didn’t yield any result.

Recently, chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami had laid foundation stones for various corporation schemes worth Rs 1,875 crore. But it’s not known how much the city corporation has allocated to implement them.

S Santhananarayanan, assistant city corporation commissioner (accounts), said “The commissioner wanted to make the event simple due to time constraint. So, the budget was passed without informing the media.”

Corporation public relations officer Gandhi said he was not informed about the budget. “Had I known, I would have informed the media.”

Former councillor C Gopalakrishnan said every tax paying citizen had the right to know about the budget. “The civic body has deprived them of this right by passing the budget secretly.”

CPM district secretary S Muthukannan said they had serious doubt over the transparency of the civic body.

“I did not know that the budget was passed. It’s an unprecedented move. Whereas, Coimbatore corporation has openly passed the budget,” said Tirupur south MLA S Gunasekaran, who had earlier served as deputy mayor of the (Tirupur) corporation.

When contacted, the corporation commissioner said they were busy preparing for chief minister’s visit to the city (on February 28). “Our engineers were in Chennai to prepare paper works of smart city project. So, we did not have time to pass the budget by inviting the media.”