Kochi: First, they made a sham of preparing a City Development Plan (CDP). When asked to rework on it, they happily sat on it, doing nothing.
The result: the crores of rupees the Kochi corporation and its suburbs would have got to lift the quality of life of people living there never reached them. And the city still has to grapple with haphazard ways of development.
A proper CDP was the pre-requisite for availing funds under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) for its duration (2005-2012).
The elected representatives and officials of the Kochi Corporation, two municipalities and 13 panchayats were responsible for preparing it after consulting the stakeholders.
They did prepare one and submitted it to Union Urban Development ministry, but it was rated as a poor development document. The ministry also asked the civic body to resubmit the plan after incorporating 28 points on various topics.
Though the local body conducted a workshop in November 2012 to revise the CDP, attended by chiefs of local bodies in the urban agglomeration, no action was taken to realise the recommendations.
Experts from Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI), a Hyderabad-based autonomous organisation imparting training in the field of management development, had suggested that being an emerging urban economy, Kochi’s CDP should be a consultative document with a strategic planning for 20 to 25 years.
Well-known town planner Kuldip Singh also had stressed the need to have a vision document in a very dense city like Kochi where there is severe scarcity of land. But to no avail.
“When the urban development experts appraise the city development plans submitted by the 63 cities selected for JNNURM, Kochi’s development document was the poorest,” said corporation town planning committee chairman K. J Sohan.
“Though we’ve been asked to submit a revised, well-prepared CDP, no follow-up was done. Now, various development projects being carried out in the city have no planning.”
