Roads that look like Dutch cheese with holes. Streetlights that let the night sky outshine them. Sewage that peeps out the drain and greets motorists.
If such civic anomalies don’t elude your notice and leave you annoyed, you may probably want to join the “ward team”, a group of residents in your ward who volunteer to keep a close watch on civic conditions and developments there.
City-based voluntary organisation Arappor Iyakkam is working on forming ‘ward teams’ across Chennai. It formed a ward team for Ward 123 at the ‘Know Your Rights’ session that was held recently.
The meeting educated participants on how projects by government agencies, especially the Greater Chennai Corporation, are executed, and how citizens can monitor infrastructure projects such as stormwater drain construction and road-laying, among others.
Apart from the afore-mentioned ward, teams have been formed in the following wards: wards 188, 189, 66, 179, 132, 64, 13, 135, 114, 78 and 84. Arappor Iyakkam will soon form similar teams in the rest of the wards of the Corporation. A two-day residential training programme for volunteer-members will be conducted wherein they will be taught how to work for the development of their wards, use Right to Information (RTI) to obtain information from government departments.
Jayaram Venkatesan, convenor of Arappor Iyakkam, says that in December 2010, the State government passed amendments to the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919, that would allow for the provision of forming ward committees promoting citizen participation in urban governance. According to a notification published on the Greater Chennai Corporation’s website, 15 ward committees have been constituted for each zone. The rules for the same have not been notified though. However, these ward committees exist only on paper, says Venkatesan.
“The Greater Chennai Corporation has a total of 200 wards but there are only 15 ward committees which are insufficient to address the issues and they do not give the residents an effective platform to participate in urban governance. The lack of local body leadership in Chennai, due to the local bodies election getting delayed by three years, has only compounded the problems for citizens. The ward team initiative seeks to empower people and enable them to have a say in local governance,” he adds.
Each ward team will have about 50 members as volunteers and their primary focus will be resolution of civic issues in their localities by pressuring the local government to take action.
“The ward teams’ job is to identify civic problems in their area and make the government machinery address and solve the issues. They will also exert pressure on the government to form functional ward committees in compliance with the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act. These ward teams will work like a model ward committee,” Jayaram adds.
The ward teams will also spread awareness among the residents in their area to file complaints and RTIs with the Corporation and other government departments, and use other grievance redressal mechanisms. They will also be part of campaigns in the city such as those relating to restoration of waterbodies, implementation of solid waste management rules, encroachments and policy issues, says Jayaram.
Meera Ravikumar, a member of a ward team from Ward 175 and one of the founders of Voice of People, an NGO, says that the decision to constitute the ward committee was made after a coalition of civil society organisations joined hands to find ways to facilitate citizen participation in local governance. “We invited two speakers — one from Kerala and the other from Bengaluru, the two places where ward committees have been successful — who shared their insights and the process followed in their respective places. The models followed in Kerala and Bengaluru gave us hope that we could replicate it in Chennai,” she says.
If you want to join the ward team and work for the betterment of your ward, call 72000 20099 or e-mail contact@arappor.org