Councillors flag complaints against contractors; Mayor assures action

CHENNAI: Chennai Mayor R Priya said that the contracts which have marked complaints by the council members will be cancelled and action will be taken on those contracts, on Friday during the monthly council meeting at the Ripon building.

During the zero hour, D Vishwanathan, the standing committee chairman for education, parks and playgrounds flagged a complaint against the "Mullai Malar" contract enterprise in a recent death of a 7 year old boy who drowned in a public swimming pool, wondering why no action was taken on the contractor.

Likewise, another council member K Kannan raised a complaint about a contractor Magesh, that the contractor has a bad history in maintaining parks and the Corporation awarded some public toilet contracts to him rather than blacklist him.

"The contracts of which the council members marked complaints will be canceled soon and actions will be taken on those contractors,” noted the Mayor.

Further, she added that the contracts will be separated into packages to avoid a single contract availing most of the contracts and a contractor will be limited to 8 -10 contracts at a time.

"New guidelines will be released to maintain the parks and awarding contracts in corporation, the Chennai corporation's prestige is vested on the maintenance and beautification of parks and toilets,” said the Commissioner.

"Parks and public toilets will be decentralized across Chennai corporation, the zonal officer of the concerned zone will call for the tender and the superintending engineer of the zone will scrutinize the process,” he added.

During the question hour, most of the council members flagged some basic amenities issues such as inadequate conservancy workers, inadequate doctors in UPHC and improper storm water drainage works.

Likewise, almost all the councilors wanted their names to be added into the town vending committee - the top body in the Chennai corporation for vendors - which streamline them into vending zones and non - vending zones, headed by the corporation commissioner. The council members' demand has been taken into consideration in the council meeting.