Thiruvananthapuram: 35 councillors skip meet by masterplan working group
Thiruvananthapuram: Of the 100 councillors, 35 did not even turn up for the masterplan working group committee meeting on Thursday. When Regional Town Planner Khaja Sherafudeen was addressing councillors, and saying that the process of preparing the draft will be completed by October, 2019, only 61 councillors were present.
Towards the end, when all discussions were over, four more joined. The town planning is about to start a land use survey and a socio-ecnomic survey soon.
Mayor V.K. Prasanth told DC that some councillors were absent, because two councillors had met with an accident. He said that there will be stakeholder consultations and more working group meetings to ensure that all issues are discussed in detail.
One of the accident victims, Attukal councillor Beena R.C. (BJP) turned up towards the end, despite her bruises. The other accident victim, Remya Ramesh S.R. had to go home. However, many BJP councillors reportedly gave the meeting a miss because they had to protest in front of Devaswom Board against Supreme Court judgment allowing women to enter Sabarimala.
A BJP councillor told DC that they got to know about the working group meeting only a day before, and then both events clashed. Some of the working groups were extremely short-handed, and had to be clubbed together with other groups. The group which was to discuss disaster management just had three people—two councillors and an official from the town planning department.
The direction of the discussion here, was primarily steered by the official who had come with an indicative format for urban data collection for disaster management.
It had listed “floods, earthquake, cyclone, landslides, tsunami, fire and others”. If Poonthura councillor Peter Solomon had not intervened, the list would not have had ‘turbulant sea’ as one of the disasters.
“Thiruvananthapuram is mostly affected by floods and fire,” he said. A detailed data regarding the history of disasters and a five-year-history of dam management were proposed after official suggested it. Many groups did not have officials from concerned departments.
The group which discussed ‘Water and Sewage Waste’ had no official from KWA. Former Welfare Committee Chairperson R Geetha Gopal said that since there were no Child Development Project Officers, several important issues could not be discussed.
