The Hindu 25.03.2017
Thrust on waste management, infrastructure
Deputy Mayor Rakhi Ravikumar presenting the Corporation budget on Friday; (right) BJP councillors returning the red bags distributed along with the budget document and asking for black ones instead at the council hall.C. Ratheesh Kumar
City Corporation presents Rs. 988.96-crore budget for 2017-18; My City, Beautiful City project gets an outlay of Rs. 20 crore
With liberal quotes of O.N.V. Kurup’s poetry and a spell of magic in the surplus figures, Deputy Mayor Rakhi Ravikumar presented the city Corporation’s Rs. 988.96-crore budget for the financial year 2017-18. But the revised budget estimates for the previous year might not be comfortable reading for the Corporation authorities as the total expenditure stands at Rs. 486.2 crore, just about one-third of the total outlay of Rs. 1,248.36.
That perhaps explains this year’s comparatively reduced outlay, which has fallen below Rs. 1,000 crore for the first time in recent years. The surplus in the previous year’s revised budget is a hefty Rs. 239.8 crore, while this year it is Rs. 64.19 crore.
The Corporation’s budget looks partly like a rewind of the budgets from previous years, though some level of freshness and even adventure, in the form of an amusement park at Vilappilsala, is evident. Waste management and infrastructure continues to be the focus of the budget this year too.
The My City, Beautiful City project gets an outlay of Rs. 20 crore. Keeping in mind the local body’s current blanket ban on plastic bags and criticism from various quarters on the lack of enough materials to replace them, the budget has proposed the setting up of a manufacturing unit of cloth and paper bags at a cost of Rs. 2.5 crore, with the prospect of employing 2,000 people.
As a first step towards completely shifting to LED street lighting, Rs. 10 crore has been set aside for solar powered-LED lights along the Kazhakuttam-Kovalam bypass. LED lights will be used for all new street light replacements in the current year. For the development of model ring roads connecting the Highways, an amount of Rs. 8 crore has been allocated. Ward resource centres get an allocation of Rs. 30 crore. For the upgrading of sewerage networks, Rs. 5 crore has been set aside.
A modern ‘city hall’ will be set up on the Corporation’s land at Jagathy, at a cost of Rs. 10 crore. Convention centres will come up at Vazhayila and Kadakampally at a total cost of Rs. 20 crore.
For mini drinking water projects, Rs. 20 crore has been allocated. The slaughterhouse at Kunnukuzhy, which has remained closed for the past three years, is set for a revival at a cost of Rs. 15 crore.
The existing crematoriums at Kazhakuttam and Kanjirampara will be renovated at a cost of Rs. 2 crore. Corporation’s hospitals will be renovated at a cost of Rs. 3 crore.
The budget has set aside Rs. 75 lakh for buying bicycles for girl students of classes 8 and 9 in the coastal regions and in the Scheduled Caste regions. The ‘Ananthapuri medicals’ project at a cost of Rs. 20 lakh is aimed at making accessible medicines at affordable cost.
