Chennai: The posts of councillors representing a few wards in the greater Chennai area have remained vacant for the past two years, forcing people to depend on civic officials for improvements to be done in the wards falling under the Chennai corporation and Tambaram municipality.
Ward 35, comprising Erukancherry, Muthamil Nagar, KKD Nagar, Kodungayur and a few other localities, remains without a public representative since 2011 when corporation ward councillor A. Gnanasekaran died.
People in this ward still report their civic woes to the zonal chairman or Gnanasekaran’s son, a willing listener but without the power to effect a solution, says T. Shelvin, who runs a timber shop in the locality.
“We see that no development works are hindered in such cases. The maximum amount of funds spent in our zone is on ward 35,” says ward 34 councillor Lakshmi Narayanan, who has no idea when the elections would be held.
Similar is the state of ward 166 after its councillor V.N.P. Venkataraman was recently elected as the MLA of the Alandur constituency where byelection was held last month. A senior official in the corporation said it was up to the State Election Commission to decide upon the byelections for ward councillors.
The adjacent Tambaram municipality too has been affected where, after the demise of the ward 7 and ward 33 councillors last year, the wards remain without any major development works. “Any issue in our area is brought to the notice of the municipality and they have never missed taking appropriate steps to clear the matter up,” says P. Baskaran, a resident of Ranganathapuram (ward 7).
“I am in charge of all the wards under the Tambaram municipality; I take immediate action on any issue brought to my notice, our party cadres and office bearers take care of the wards which are without a councillor. The EC has not informed us about byelections in the wards,” says chairman of the Tambaram municipality M. Karikalan. Efforts to reach State Election Commissioner S. Ayyar failed.
