| There is yet another entry in the list of makeovers this season, that of the small towns of Gujarat. Three years ago, Kadi in the Mehsana district, was just like an average Indian municipal town-dirty, disorganised and poorly kept in terms of amenities like roads, water and sewerage facilities. Home to around 56,000 persons, the town scored poorly on the organisation and finance fronts. For years, the people of the town did not pay their taxes and the local municipality was helpless. It had little power over the people and was unable to make tax recoveries from them. Three years ago, however, the state launched a drive to improve civic conditions in its Tier II and III towns. The drive received a robust momentum when the Government declared 2005 as the Urban Development Year and undertook a drive to improve the health of the municipalities. Kadi has now transformed itself into an epitome of development. Its roads are clean and its new municipal building resembles a corporate house. What's more, not only has taxes worth Rs 75 lakh, which had not been paid by the locals for years, been recovered, the residents have now become voluntary partners in its development. Kadi municipality chief officer, Naresh Patel says, "Our town is fit to be labelled New Kadi. The transformation is simply unbelievable." Its slums now have pay-and-use toilets while the town's roads look aesthetic with a number of traffic circles in place. This development story, however, has not remained limited to Kadi alone. Almost all the 161 municipalities of the state have become a part of this silent revolution. The drive involved utilising the various development schemes initiated by the Centre to its fullest, reforming the outdated municipal laws and rules, removing encroachments, improving financial management and above all inculcating a sense of pride in the residents and civic officials of these small towns by sheer motivation. "I see the mess in urban development not as a problem but as an opportunity for introducing change and making towns livable," said Chief Minister Narendra Modi. And it seems that the opportunity has been well utilised as today almost all municipalities across the state leaving aside a few have been transformed. The biggest proof of this is the combined tax arrears of all the municipalities in the state amounting to over Rs 150 crore, which had been pending for years, have been paid for by the residents in the past year-and-a-half, motivated by the good work they had seen. Says K. Srinivas, managing director of the Gujarat Urban Development Company (GUDC), "The change we have envisioned is from the grassroots. It is real and not cosmetic." That the drive has boosted the state BJP unit's fortunes has already been proved in the state civic polls held in 2005. So, it was not without reason that in Gujarat Urban Development Summit held last month, the state attracted private investments worth Rs 2.12 lakh crore in the urban development sector in the form of 312 MoUs. The state's growing efficiency can be gauged from the fact that when the Union Government decided to allocate funds to states for urban infrastructure development in 2005, it found that Gujarat had already carried out all the reforms and changes in the taxation system that had been placed as riders for availing the funds prompting Union Urban Development Secretary M. Ramachandran to observe, "Gujarat is showing a new path of urban governance. India is going to benefit from the state's urban development initiatives." A slew of measures to make urban life better have now been launched in the state. For the first time in the country, the state has embarked upon "Carbon trade" by selling Certified Emission Reductions in the world market. Funds collected from this trade are being directed towards solid waste management projects. Measures like double entry accounting and area-based property tax structure are expected to ensure transparent tax collection and remove the possibility of its evasion. The state has also reserved Rs 300 crore for buying modern equipment for municipal solid waste management and has introduced door-to-door waste collection facility. Work for 96 vermi-composting and 34 microbial composting units in public-private partnership has also begun. With the GUDC signing an MoU with the UTI Bank, the municipalities in the state will get access to funds from the capital markets through municipal bonds, a first in the country. For the BJP which considers Gujarat its model state, the civic success seems just the right platform from which to launch the coming poll campaign. Index |
