Tardy pace: Only 1.8 lakh houses surveyed so far by Amritsar MC

Amritsar, August 9

Only 1.80 lakh houses out of 3 lakh households have been surveyed for delimitation by Amritsar Municipal Corporation staff till date. The slow pace of the survey may cause further delay in the completion of the delimitation process. The Local Bodies Department had instructed the Municipal Corporation to conduct delimitation of wards of the city in view of the upcoming civic body poll.

In June, MC officials went Chandigarh to get training for the survey. After this, the drawing branch of the MC prepared the map and marked block on it. The city has been divided into 7,000 blocks. A total of 10 teams led by a senior official were constituted and 304 employees deployed in the field for the survey, which had started on June 15.

The Local Bodies Department had given instructions to the MC to complete this survey by July 24. Senior MC officials claimed that the survey would be completed within one month. It has been around two months, but the block officials have not completed it yet.

Some block officials still have not submitted their survey data to the drawing branch. The drawing branch still has not got the complete block-wise list of population count of separate categories — general, SC and BC.

In this way, there is still a lot of work left in the delimitation process and some flaws are also visible in the survey.

Out of the 7,000 blocks constituted for the delimitation of the city, there are 6,050 blocks where delimitation survey was initiated. Survey teams have not reached several areas of the city. The residents of these areas say what kind of delimitation is being conducted as no one has visited their homes to conduct a survey.

MC Commissioner Kumar Saurabh Raj asked the MC staff to speed up the survey work and complete the task.

“We have asked the senior officials to hire some private firm for the survey as they have trained staff for this task. Now, MC employees are overburdened and facing several issues related to the field,” said a junior MC official, deployed on the survey duty.