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.