With crucial municipal elections across West Bengal slated to take place next month, Union minister of state for Urban Development and Trinamool Congress leader Saugata Roy indicated that he was less than satisfied with reforms undertaken by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM).
Among other objectives, the JNNURM requires municipal authorities of cities applying for assistance under the scheme to implement accounting reforms, e-governance applications, property tax reforms and the levy of user charges for water supply, sewerage and so on. Roy, however, said that the KMC had not enforced the stipulated reforms under the scheme, which is the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's flagship urban development programme.
“I don't think much has been done. Under the JNNURM, certain things such as double-entry accounting and e-governance are required. Many of the mandatory reforms have not been undertaken,” he told Business Standard. For instance, the scheme mandates urban local bodies, such as the KMC, to formulate and adopt a policy on user charges for all services in order to ensure the full realisation of operation and maintainance (O&M) costs by 2012.
But according to available data for 2004-05, while the total O&M cost for water supply and sewage in the city was Rs 850, 000,000, the total user charges collected was only Rs 290,000,000. Therefore, while per unit cost was Rs 0.61, only Rs 0.21 per unit was recovered through users. A large part of the water supply problem in the city is due to the lack of water meters across most households supplied by the KMC.
Although the Kolkata Environment Improvement Project (KEIP) — a multi-agency body funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the West Bengal government and the KMC — had previously secured a loan for the procurement and installing of water meters, the project hadn't taken off after the Trinamool Congress and other parties opposed it. Despite that, Roy promised that the situation would change if the Trinamool Congress came to control the municipal bodies, including the KMC, after elections in May. “We shall ensure that there is more transparency (if we win the election). At present, the implementation of the programme has been very slow,” he said.
