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�GMC administrator needed to manage city affairs�

By Staff Reporter

GUWAHATI, Aug 9 - Since the term of the Mayor-in-council of the GMC is over and it was dissolved on July 31 last, the burning problems of Guwahati like scarce drinking water, absence of streetlights, solid waste management, drainage and sewerage, flash flood, etc, will now have to be managed by the GMC Commissioner, though it seems to be humanly impossible for the Commissioner, Monalisa Goswami, to carry such a huge work load.

Therefore, until the GMC council is formed through an election, an administrator should be appointed to manage the civic affairs of the city in the interim period, said voluntary organisation Save Guwahati Build Guwahati (SGBG) here. Its general secretary Satyen Doloi told this newspaper that any of the former bureaucrats like CK Das, Subhas Das, Dhiren Saikia and veteran social workers who are engaged in works to develop Guwahati for decades, may be considered in this respect.

The SGBG also appealed to the Guwahati taxpayers to elect those people as their councillors and area members who are known to be efficient social workers with a good public image. The taxpayers should not attach much importance to the political allegiance of such candidates.

The SGBG is also of the view that the Guwahati Municipal Corporation Act has some shortcomings, which have resulted in the lack of coordination among the area members and the councillors. To remove this, this piece of legislation should be amended incorporating the provision for raising the number of municipal wards of the city to 90 to cover the entire Guwahati Metropolitan Area (GMA). The provision for area members should be dropped from this legislation, maintains SGBG.

Considering the fact that Guwahati is the gateway to the NE which has the potential to become the gateway to South East Asia, it needs to be kept clean and developed into a modern metropolis. For the sake of developing Guwahati into a modern metropolis, politicising issues like encroachment of any character on the city hills, wetlands and open areas should be avoided by all.

It should be borne in mind by anybody who claims to be a well-wisher of Guwahati and its people, that with its current load of population, the ecological balance of Guwahati has attained the point of collapse. So it will be prudent for all to accept the fact that those who have come to Guwahati in recent decades and are settling on such plots of land should be provided with housing facilities by the government. In no way the demand for allotment of land to such people should either be raised or conceded to. It should always be kept in mind by all the conscientious people that these freshers in Guwahati need shelter.

Again, the well-off people who are encroaching on the city riverfront, wetlands, hills and Govt land should be evicted and the officials who helped them obtain legal papers to justify their illegal occupation of such plots of land punished, said Doloi.

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