The Indian Express 14.03.2013
PMC to award 5 cleanest housing societies every year
To encourage good civic practices among citizens, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has decided to award five cooperative housing societies for maintaining cleanliness on their premises and judiciously using water.
After the coordination committee meeting of all party leaders, Mayor Vaishali Bankar said public participation was required to inculcate civic sense among citizens and the PMC initiative would help in achieving it.
"Every year the civic body would select five housing societies for best civic practices and give them awards," she said.
The performance would be based on cleanliness of the housing society premises, effective management of solid waste generated there and proper use of water, along with timely payment of property tax by residents.
"This is the beginning of a plan to encourage citizens to join hands with PMC in making the city beautiful," said NCP leader Subhash Jagtap.
In last year's budget, the PMC had announced that the best performing electoral ward would be rewarded with additional funds for carrying development work in their respective areas. The PMC is now all set to complete the process of selecting four electoral wards for the award.
"The scheme of awarding electoral wards would continue and it requires citizens, elected representatives and civic staff to join hands, while the scheme for housing societies would be completely with the citizens for their performance," said Jagtap.
The coordination committee unanimously decided that the benches, bus stops and signages from civic funds would not have names of local representatives from now onwards.
"There will be uniformity in the size and colour of the bus stops, benches and signages across the city. There will be no names of any local corporator on it," added Jagtap.
NCP spokesperson Ankush Kakade said he had been demanding that the civic administration should stop the wrong practice of allowing names of local corporators on the benches, buckets and bus stops from civic funds. "It is a welcome step to not allow the names of corporators on civic properties, but it has to be strictly implemented," he added.
The Sajag Nagrik Manch, too, had requested the municipal commissioner to direct civic officers to stop the practice.
More Aadhaar registration centres to speed up drive
To speed up Aadhaar enrolment, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has decided to start two registration centres each in the 76 electoral panels.
"The PMC has registered 17.50 lakh citizens for Aadhaar so far. There has been a rush for registration and to ensure that more citizens get registered as soon as possible there would be centres to be opened at each of electoral panel," said Mangesh Joshi, Deputy Municipal Commissioner.
He said the civic administration plans to cover 80 per cent of the citizens by the end of the year as additional machines for Aadhaar registration have been made available for the city.
Joshi said the civic administration had conducted a special drive in schools of the city to enroll as many students as possible for Aadhaar registration .
