Ludhiana Corporation approves projects worth Rs 100 cr

12 Sep 2022 CW Team

In a meeting held at the mayor's camp office, the civic body's finance and contracts committee (F&CC) approved roughly 250 resolutions pertaining to development works valued at about 1 billion as Municipal elections are anticipated to take place by the end of the year.

The same occurs at a time when the municipal corporation (MC) is struggling to make ends meet, including paying employee salaries. Following the same, there appears to be a lack of precise planning for financing these projects.

During the meeting, which lasted for more than four and a half hours, 277 resolutions were presented, according to the information. About 250 of these were approved by the committee led by mayor Balkar Sandhu, including initiatives funded by the National Clean Air Program (NCAP) and the Smart City Mission. The majority of the projects involved building new roads, installing tube wells, and installing sewer lines.

Due to the impending elections, council members have been putting increasing pressure on the mayor to approve projects for their respective wards.

However, Sandhu claimed that given the already established quota for each councillor, the projects had been approved. Prior to this, the finance committee established annual budgets of 10 million for inner wards and 15 million for outer wards.

“The projects which have to be taken up on priority basis have been approved like installation of tubewells. As the MC has been facing shortage of funds, the other projects have been approved considering the fixed quota of councillors. If the councillor had already got projects approved equal to his quota, then the additional projects have been kept pending for now,” the mayor stated.

According to Sandhy, the state government's failure to release its portion of the goods and services tax (GST), which is close to 1 billion, has left the civic body with a funding shortage.

The MC has already gotten a loan for 1 billion to do development work, and if projects need to be started, the money will be used for that.