Tamil Nadu - Coimbatore   

Pending works wait for Corporation polls to end

Special Correspondent

COIMBATORE: Repairs to almost every road in the city and amenities to unapproved layouts top the list of works that await the completion of elections in the Coimbatore Corporation. The elections to the standing committees are being held and this will be completed on Saturday.

Sources in the civic body said that the first meeting of the new Council is expected later this month and many infrastructure-related problems might be raised in it.

Drinking water lines

Works to provide roads and drinking water lines to unapproved layouts could not take off as elections to the local bodies had been announced. After a long struggle by councillors, the Government announced a scheme for the regularisation of house sites in over 500 unapproved layouts in the city.

The Corporation had announced that roads, drinking water lines, streetlights and storm water drains would come in the next phase. Even as the Corporation was into the process of drawing up estimates for various works, the local body elections were announced. According to the sources, groundwork had already begun in finding out how many streetlights each layout required.

Amenities to these layouts might figure in the discussions in the first Council meeting itself. But, the condition of roads across the city would be a raging issue in the Council.

The Corporation had already said that it had gone through every other procedure and repairs to the roads could be taken up once all the elections were conducted.

After reviewing the condition across the city in the wake of heavy rain, Mayor `Colony' R. Venkatachalam had said that repairs to roads would be taken up on a priority. But, every procedure including inviting multiple bids should be gone through in order to avoid charges of irregularities.

The Mayor was indicating that though the process would take its due time, the Corporation was focussed on completing soon all the pending works. The sources said the civic body had already accorded top priority to major schemes such as the ones for underground drainage, drinking water and infrastructure such as subways and flyovers that would be implemented under the Jawaharlal National Urban Renewal Mission.

But, as a first step, repairs to roads at nearly Rs.25 crore that were cleared before the elections, would be taken up. Measures to prevent flooding of roads were already on to minimise damage to them.

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