Dy mayor claims disparity in devp works across wards

Ludhiana: Mayor Balkar Sandhu postponed the meeting of Finance and Contracts Committee (F&CC) after senior deputy mayor Shyam Sunder Malhotra raised the issue of councillor quota in the meeting on Thursday. The next date has not been ascertained as of now.
The MC has fixed Rs 1 crore for inner ward development works and Rs 1.5 crore for the outer wards, but the senior deputy mayor Malhotra claimed that in some wards councillors have exceeded the fixed quota, while in others councillors barely have enough to carry out developmental works. He added that developmental works should be carried out across all wards, shunning the pick and choose policy.
Malhotra asked mayor to look into the issue. The mayor has demanded for the report of tender inviting cell (TIC) to look into the development works carried out in the last one year. The F&CC meeting will take place only after the report is produced and looked into.
After listening to the senior deputy mayor, mayor Balkar Sandhu asked the superintending engineer of bridges and road department branch H S Bhullar to get the reports prepared. Sandhu said, “When fixed quota has been fixed for each councillor, then works should be allotted as per the norms. First we will check TIC reports and after that, new estimates for the new fiscal will be prepared.”
Notably, the MLA from North constituency Rakesh Pandey had conducted a meeting with mayor Sandhu and MC commissioner KP Brar on June 19 and where he raised question on the policies of MC while saying that development should be done equally. In this meeting too development works over Rs 50 crores were about to be cleared.