What's in a name? A lot for BMC

While a commoner continues to be plagued by serious civic issues, including water crisis and health scares, the elected representatives seem largely to be focused on other, more trivial, problems. According to the Praja Foundation report, in the last one year, corporators cutting across party lines have been found to be busy debating and discussing naming and renaming of roads and chowks in their wards.

Going by the numbers, during 724 meetings held this year, 374 questions were raised on the naming and renaming issue. The issue came second in rank, to be topped by only the roads issue, on which 425 questions were raised in 2016. The top 10 issues that shook the civic body included illegal and unauthorised buildings (208), civic administration-related issues (156), licenses (134), water supply (126), gardens (122), solid waste management (106), government-municipal plot or market (105) and health-related problems (91).

On the other hand, issues such as municipal schools (62), education (55), scams and corruption (37), community development (31), footpaths (19), cemeteries (10), sensitive diseases (18) and civic policies and schemes (13) were given the least importance.

The white paper revealed that 10 elected councillors raised no questions in the entire year. They includes, Rahul Shewale (SS), Changez Multani (Independent), Hemlata Wange (MNS), Sabreddy Borra (RPI-A), Lalita Annamalai (Independent), Jyotsna Parmar (SP), Manisha Patil (SS), Mangal Kadam (MNS), Shweta Rane (SS) and Kesarben Patel (INC).