No report on study tours presented for discussion

Rajinder Nagarkoti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 28

While the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation spent Rs 18 lakh on study tours of councillors and officials for Mumbai, Pune and Vishakhapatnam, but in the MC General House meeting no report on study tour was presented for discussion.

The councillors returned from their respective tours around six days ago, but no report was presented at the MC House.

The MC in the past 13 years had spent nearly Rs 1.50 crore on study tours, but the civic body does not have any record of the projects being implemented in the city on the basis of such ‘wasteful’ study tours.

After the recent study tours, the MC had issued a press statement according to which the councillors ‘studied’ the working of a garbage processing plant, door-to-door collection of garbage and techniques to clean sewer lines, but no such report on the projects studied by the councillors was presented at the MC House today.

This time, a total of 25 councillors and seven MC officials had gone to study tour to three Indian cities — Pune, Mumbai and Visakhapatnam — in three different groups between April 17 and 22.

Recently, former Union Minister and senior BJP leader Harmohan Dhawan had raised his objection on such wasteful study tours. He had written to Mayor Asha Jaswal in this regard.