Chaos marks MCD’s last meet

Chaos marks MCD’s last meet

Cong Members Protest As BJP Pushes Through 115 Proposals

TIMES NEWS NETWORK 

New Delhi: In the last meeting of the unified MCD House on Friday, the ruling BJP sanctioned 115 proposals related to promotion and recruitment of staff and development work in the city. With model code of conduct in place since March 5, Congress councillors protested against this move saying that it was aimed at “gaining publicity”. 
    The Delhi Election Commission will go through the list of proposals passed in Friday’s meeting and give stopwork orders if the projects are found to be in violation of the code of conduct. 
    Soon after the proposals were tabled, Congress councillors started shouting slogans to oppose the move. “How can they approve proposals when mode code of conduct is in place? This is a cheap tactics to appease voters. They are just misusing their powers,’’ said Ajit Singh Chaudhury, Congress councillors. 
    But BJP councillors claim that a majority of the projects which were approved by the House were given in-anticipation approval by the mayor before the code of conduct became effective. “The proposals have been tabled by the commissioner. We have just executed our duty. If there is any proposal which is in violation of the code of conduct then the commissioner has the power to stop the work,’’ said Subhash Arya, leader of the MCD House. 
    Proposals related to promotion and recruitment of MCD staff, approval for construction work of roads, drains, MCD school buildings, community centres, dispensaries and so on were given approval by ruling BJP amid protest by Congress councillors. MCD also cleared projects like naming of roads, installation of statues and interestingly, a special survey to “prepare a vision document-2025 for MCD”. Several Congress councillors went to State Election Commission to register their protest. 
    When contacted, Rakesh Mehta, Delhi Election Commissioner, said, “We will examine the proposals which were passed by the House on Friday. But if projects were given in-anticipatory approval by the mayor before the code of conduct came into effect then the House can pass the projects now. We will still go through the list, and if there are some projects which will affect the election process then we will ask the MCD commissioner to put the work on hold.” 
    However, MCD officials say that most of the projects approved by the MCD can be implemented only after approval from newly formed corporations.

Source: Times of India