The Hindu : New Delhi News : Municipalities queue up for `paid' MCD advice

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 16, 2004

New Delhi

New Delhi

Municipalities queue up for `paid' MCD advice

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI, DEC. 15. Several municipalities of the country, including Mumbai and Kolkata, have approached the Municipal Corporation of Delhi to seek its expert "paid" consultancy for improving their civic amenities.

The virtual queuing up of municipal corporations from across the nation comes a week after the Municipal Commissioner, Rakesh Mehta, announced that the civic body would set up MCD Consultancy Services to give consultancy to urban local bodies.

While the MCD is yet to develop a proper procedure, fix a price for consultancies and install requisite infrastructure for its new service, some of the municipalities are understood to have offered as much as Rs. 10 lakhs for `expert advice' from the civic body.

The development has forced the MCD to speedup up its process to set up the Consultancy Services. Mr. Mehta said he would depute a special officer for the new initiative. "Over the past two years, we gained expertise in areas of public-private partnership, e-governance and citizen interface. We now intend to share this experience with other municipalities and make it a revenue earning venture of the MCD," he said.

While several corporations like those from Mumbai, Guwahati and Jaipur have sought expert advice of the MCD in handling the solid waste generated in their cities, other civic bodies, like that of Kolkata, has asked for assistance for installing and implementing the people-friendly unit area system of property tax.

Depending on the nature of consultancies sought, the MCD is planning to either give training to the officials of the other municipalities here in the Capital, send its team of officials to other civic bodies to improve civic amenities, or prepare a comprehensive project report as is being done by reputed consultancy firms. It is understood that a team of officials from Guwahati had recently approached MCD to prepare an action plan to solve their solid waste problem.

Similarly in the field of death and birth registration and issue of certificates, the MCD is being approached by several municipalities to adopt an on-line system that has been appreciated by the Registrar General of India.

In this way, the MCD has come a long way. Just two years ago, its officials were seen moving around municipalities across the country like Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Bangalore seeking consultancy and advice from them. And officials from even smaller corporations like Vijayawada had given a presentation to its officials here on e-governance.

But the tide has since turned. Mr. Mehta said the MCD Consultancy Services was not only an effort to generate revenue for the civic body, but also share the expertise which its officials had got in the past two years during the process of urban governance reforms, which have been unleashed in the past two years.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi

News Update

Stories in this Section