The Hindu 06.12.2010
Technically challenged councillors do not use assigned emails
Corporation's effort to make Councillors tech-savy has not taken off.
COIMBATORE: The Coimbatore Corporation wants its councillors to be tech-savvy in dealing with their constituency and has assigned them email addresses. But the effort to make them keep pace with the times has not borne fruit. Why?
Provide training
Explains C. Sivakami, Councillor, Ward 17: “In the first instance, most of us are not aware that we have email addresses to reach out to the public. Even if we know about such a facility, we are not e-enabled. Councillors like me do not know how to access mails. The civic body should have trained us and not stopped with just assigning mail addresses.”
P. Shobana of Ward 4, concurs. “Councillors being e-challenged is the reason,” she says. Her guesstimate is that more than 60 of the 72 councillors have not accessed their mails since it was assigned four years ago.
A tech-savvy councillor, she regularly uses the facility but hardly gets mails from the public.
“Initially, people were mailing me, maybe for a couple of months. Now I don't get mails.”
No response
Ms. Shobana explains that using emails also depends on public response. “If people are not responding through email, what is the use of having an email address at all?” There was a proposal to train councillors, she agrees, but that did not materialise.
Asked about the problem, Anshul Mishra, Corporation Commissioner, said the civic body had trained its entire staff and most of the internal communication was done electronically.
The councillors would be trained shortly. Since the general public still preferred to submit their petitions as hardcopy, the councillors hardly had any incentive to learn to use emails, he admitted.
