NGOs urge CM to approve MC upgrade at Palampur

Our Correspondent

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Palampur, August 18

Six panchayats of satellite areas of Palampur, local NGOs and other social bodies of the town today requested Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur to approve the upgrade of the Palampur Municipal Council to a municipal corporation, which is a long-standing demand of the residents.

In a letter addressed to the Chief Minister, they urged him that Palampur had expanded fast in the past 10 years, and the formation of a corporation was a must for planned urbanisation. The state should follow Uttarakhand, which had set up six municipal corporations in 2017.

They requested the Chief Minister to instruct the departments concerned to start the process without delay, so that the required data could be collected for the final approval of the government.

Kulbhushan Ralhan, Subhash Sharma and Suresh Kumar, spokespersons for various social bodies, said that the panchayats, which were to be merged for the formation of the corporation, had already been included in the data compiled by the government and the process should begin at all levels, particularly when all political parties had given their consents for an MC at Palampur.

Shanta Kumar, former MPr, had written a letter to the Chief Minister in this regard. He had apprised the Chief Minister that the Palampur Municipal Council was set up in 1952, and since then its limits had never been extended in the past 68 years. Its population today is 3,500.

Shanta Kumar had said that if a corporation comes up at Palampur, the problems related to garbage disposal, streetlighting, safe drinking water and other civic amenities would be solved.