Dairy booth allotment policy: JMC-G councillors move HC

Jaipur: Two councillors of Jaipur Municipal Corporation (JMC) Greater have filed a writ petition in the high court challenging the state government’s process of allocating dairy booths, which they say is being done without involving the licensing committee of the civic body.
“Every time whenever the process of dairy booth allocations had been initiated in the past, the licensing committees had played the most important role. This time the government has adopted a process where booths are being allotted bypassing the licensing committee. We have challenged this decision before the high court,” said Vinod Sharma, one of the councillors who has filed the petition.
He said the high court accepted their petition on Thursday and asked JMC Greater to send a written reply within two weeks.
A JMC-Greater official agreed with the councillors’ contention. “The government should have understood that to implement any project at the grassroots level, people’s representiaves are very important. This is the exact reason why municipal corporations have licensing committees. But in this allotment process of dairy booths, the licensing committee has no role to play. This is injustice,” the official said.
For 563 dairy booths to be allotted under JMC Greater areas, a total of 19,905 applications were received. After scrutiny of these, more than 8,000 were rejected. A lottery was drawn from the remaining 11,235 applications and now there are only 2,252 applicants left—a set of four applicants for each of the 563 booths. The government will now conduct an interview to choose who to allot the booths to—one applicant given one booth.
JMC Greater officials have alleged that there were a few discrepancies in this process. For one specific booth, a group of four was selected even though in the original applications there were only two contenders for that booth.
Second, many booths are reserved for categories like SC/ST/OBC but in the selection process a person belonging to a certian caste has been chosen for a booth reserved for a different category, the officials say.
“Such problems could have been easily avoided if the licensing committee had been given the responsibilty for the selection. Since the matter is sub-judice now I don’t want to comment more. The civic body is filing a reply following the high court’s order,” said Punnet Karnawat, the deputy director of JMC Greater.