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IN FOCUS Govt’s Performance Review
Housing & Urban Development tara chand
J
ammu and Kashmir's Minister of Housing and Urban Development has too much to manage –vast lakes of Kashmir, over crowded twin capital cities of Srinagar and Jammu, fast upcoming townships, development authorities and housing boards. It is a pretty difficult task but the incumbent Minister has some added priorities also for which the Housing and Urban Development departments have been seen wanting for attention it deserves. He is also the Deputy Chief Minister and runs a lobby of the Congress in absence of the faction head Ghulam Nabi Azad. In fact most of the Congress Ministers owe their allegiance to Ghulam Nabi Azad but Tara Chand remains his key representative. Therefore, his first year in office was marked by political activities, mostly in rural and semi-urban areas, to counter Azad's bête noire and State Congress president Saifuddin Soz. It goes without any exaggeration that Tara Chand was watched by the people more for the manner in which he runs the counter-Soz lobby and not how his Ministry is being run. In one year, three administrative secretaries were changed reflecting a lack of chemistry between his office and the executing agency. His energies apparently remained focused on his own electoral constituency and the areas represented by the Congress leaders belonging to a particular camp. For flauting the status of Deputy Chief Minister he divided his time in reviewing functioning of other departments and inspection of projects outside the purview of Housing and Urban Development departments. Legislation for full empowerment and transfer of more responsibilities to the urban local bodies is awaited. Removal of polythene from the urban areas marked the single biggest initiative of the department across 2009 but before end of 2009, the polybags had resurfaced to almost their pre-ban quantity. Hardly a month is left for the present term of elected urban local bodies to expire but a plan for fresh elections is yet to be finalized. In this connection, a meeting of concerned officers on December 15 is yet to be followed up. After information obtained under the Right to Information Act, a national Television News Channel recently aired documentary claiming that more than Rs 150Cr were wasted in Dal Lake Conservation project. The Lakes and Waterways Development Authority, instead of clarifying the position –accepting facts or denying them –asked the channel to identify officers responsible for 'scam'. The meek response suggested there was, in fact, a scam.
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Vol. 4, Issue 2
Epilogue, February 2010