Mayor Shardamma has just returned from New York and guess what she learnt from the junket? That the “Indian currency is not accepted in America”.
Mayor Shardamma has just returned from New York and guess what she learnt from the junket? That the “Indian currency is not accepted in America” and that is why she could not buy anything there.
If there was anything else that the Mayor learnt from the junket (this trip officially cost BBMP Rs10 lakh) she wants to keep it a secret.
The Mayor visited New York for a summit on ‘Business Innovation and Entrepreneurship: City Strategies Programme’ from November 2 to 4 but chose not to tell anybody about the experience, opting to discuss it with “party seniors” first. Equally bizarre was a reporter’s insistence that she reveal what she wore in the Big Apple (you might get to read that story in another English daily).
When mayors go to foreign cities, ostensibly to learn about the civic machinery there, do they return with ideas or merely as passengers?
In Shardamma’s case, the latter seems to be the case. In her own words on Thursday, during interaction with reporters, she said: “I did not speak anything about promoting business in the city (Bangalore) nor about the employment or about economic development or co-operation… I only spoke about the city and its problems and the development work undertaken.”
The summit that Shardamma attended would have been an ideal platform to interact with mayors and city heads from all over the world, to learn the good things they have implemented and adapt them here to improve the civic infrastructure.
She couldn’t have had a better opportunity as she interacted with mayors of some of the best cities in the world – Geneva, Budapest, Cape Town and Johannesburg, among others.
Shardamma was given the opportunity to speak first at the conference, which she did in Kannada and it was translated into English by BBMP engineer-in chief BT Ramesh, who was also on the junket. She briefed the audience about the civic problems faced by Bangalore – without touching upon solutions, nor returning to Bangalore with any.
And it is not that she did not know what to ask during her interactions with the other delegates at the conference; because she did acknowledge the far superior civic infrastructure in the US cities:
“America is hundred times ahead of our country in development. The cities have huge footpaths and wide roads without any traffic snarls, and there is no garbage on the streets. Every citizen abides by the rules and dumps the garbage in the dustbins.”
Despite that she expressed her helplessness in implementing the same in Bangalore, citing the inability to recreate those examples here and the difficult proposition of making people understand the importance of keeping their city clean.
But why blame Shardamma alone when even the opposition leader in the BBMP council M Uday Shankar was part of the junket?
Shardamma was the only lady mayor from India to attend the summit.
Mayors from some North Indian cities, too, attended the same event that the BBMP mayor did.
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