Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Sep 04, 2007
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Online edition of India's National Newspaper Tuesday, Sep 04, 2007 ePaper |
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Tamil Nadu
Special Correspondent
INTERACTION: A delegation from five Asian countries with Alandur municipal authorities on Friday.
TAMBARAM: A delegation of officials from five Asian countries visited rural and urban local bodies in the southern suburbs of Chennai last week, as part of efforts to learn the Indian experience in attempts at decentralisation and people’s participation in governance, among other issues. The 11-member delegation comprised officials of government departments of Malaysia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives and Philippines. Stuti Lall, Associate Director-General of the New Delhi-based Society for Development Studies, which is coordinating the programme through the Ministry of Finance, said the tour was a capacity-building programme, as spelt out under the Colombo Plan. (Colombo Plan, born out of a Commonwealth Conference of Foreign Ministers in 1950, aimed at co-operative economic and social development in the Asia-Pacific, has 25 member countries, including India.) Ms. Lall said that as Colombo Plan’s objective was also to assist and share member countries’ knowledge and technologies, leaders and officials from these nations visited India each year. And this year, five countries had sent their officials to study governance and mobilisation of public support at the grass-root level. “We have come to Tamil Nadu as it is a progressive State,” she told reporters at the end of a presentation in Alandur Municipality, where the delegation was briefed on the underground drainage scheme executed in partnership with the people, government and private companies. The delegation arrived in Chennai on August 27 and visited Mudichur panchayat where they were briefed on the powers and duties of elected representatives and also the functioning of village councils. They also visited the Zero Waste Centre of Pammal Municipality, before visiting Alandur on Friday. G. Shivakumar, Town Planning Officer, guided the delegation around the installations of the underground drainage project, including its main pumping station and the sewage treatment plant in Perungudi. Municipal Chairman R. S. Bharathi told the delegation that contribution from the people, the beneficiaries, was Rs. 15 crore, nearly half the project cost. The objective of the delegation’s visit also included need assessment, information generation techniques and role of information technology in governance, Ms. Lall said. The delegation also interacted with officials of the National Informatics Centre and Department of Rural Development in Chennai to have an idea about the steps taken by the State Government to use IT tools in reaching out to the people. Ms. Lall said some countries, for instance, Philippines and Malaysia had better infrastructure. But for them, it would not have been an easy task to reach out to the people and mobilise public support for some development projects and hence, they looked to India for support and assistance, she added.
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