Abohar MC meet: Congress councillors stage a walkout
Thursday, 24/09/2015
http://www.indiapress.org/gen/news.php/The_Tribune/
Abohar : Thirteen Congress councillors walked out of a meeting held at Town Hall to protest the failure of the Municipal Council ruled by the BJP-SAD to drain out rainwater from roads, parks and residential colonies.
They staged a dharna outside and raised slogans against the local administration and the state government. The council has 33 members.
The contractual sanitation workers, who were on strike due to the non-payment of wages and alleged exploitation by contractors, joined the councillors’s dharna and sloganeering.
Earlier, when the meeting started, Congress councillors Narinder Verma, Ganesh Sablania, Ram Kumar Nirania and Gurman Singh asked why no meeting had been held for the past four months. They also complained that there had been no improvement in the sanitation system even after the recruitment of 80 more workers on contract basis. They alleged that the wards represented by the 13 Congress councillors were facing neglect at the hands of MC authorities. They questioned to whom had the contracts for sanitation been granted. As none from the ruling benches responded, they walked out.
The protesting councillors said the Municipal Council had today approved development works worth Rs 2 crore but it was under a debt of Rs 18 crore. They said Rs 2 crore had to be paid as arrears to three retired employees, eight others had filed recovery cases in different courts. The meeting did not discuss the scams which had surfaced during the past five years of the BJP-SAD rule, they said. They said Rs 55 lakh had been spent on cleaning sewerage lines by using super-suction digital machines but the pipelines remained choked.
