There have been recent incidents of conflict between the residents and builders, in the newly-occupied housing societies, and with AOAs in some cases. Lack of financial transparency in operations of AOA is the biggest issue. Justification and clarity on funds collected and its management is much needed. The public money needs to be put to correct use. Then only the trust between the residents and AOAs or builders can be achieved. It is actually the root cause of lot of our issues.
Administration needs to play pivotal role on this, wherever needed.
Residents either are short of time, with already stressed up lifestyles, hence mostly disinterested to take up voluntary activities; or they want to avoid any conflicts and live peacefully in the spare time available. However, at the same time everyone expects a well-maintained society with minimum maintenance payouts – a tough situation to make a balancing act!
Builders sometimes charge high premium and give good services, but this may not true for all builders. Also, not all residents agree to pay high service premiums. So optimizing expenses required for society maintenance works becomes a challenge.
New AOAs, at some time, work with limited experience. Conflicts in management become another challenge. Mistakes made by them become unpardonable by residents. Blame games start. Most of the active members soon also become disinterested in any such voluntary and thankless job and decide to exit. So the vicious circle continues.
Administration is generally mute spectator as it is always short of resources to keep a check on the AOA activities on day-to-day basis.
So how does one make it an efficient system?
A possible solution for some issues (like elections, financial reports, budgets, etc.) could be making use of technology. Connect all AOAs with central server of Administration. Meaning everything becomes online. The system should have access to all financial transactions for Administration and residents to keep up the transparency.
