Park Maintenance and Kafka
One of the biggest responsibilities that SCRWA took over was to take charge of the maintenance of the parks from MCG. The previous EC team had left the responsi-bility of maintaining parks to an “unknown ward committee”. Due to the lack of a sense of ownership of South City parks by the ward committee, a few “chosen parks” were maintained, most were neglected, and a few parks were maintained with funds from block-level collections.
In Mid-December, SCRWA created a committee for park maintenance with members from each block and formulated a process for submitting claims. Many blocks started this with great enthusiasm and started submitting claims to SCRWA. In fact, a few blocks that had not been maintaining their parks got together and spent from their own pockets to pay salaries and repair pipes, motors, fences etc. All this in the hope that within a short period, SCRWA will provide funds.
SCRWA team had no clue about the claim process and the person concerned at MCG just said, “Write a letter to the Exec Engineer, mention the area and amount claimed of each park and attach the vouchers as proof of spending”. We submitted, waited and then followed up. Every week a new document was required – PAN, a cancelled cheque, a summary sheet etc. And by the time all documents were completed the XEN retired so we had to wait for the new one – just what you would expect in a novel by Kafka.
It was becoming difficult for SCRWA EC to make much headway, so we called our very own “Friendly Neighbourhood Deepak”. It took him a good 3 weeks too but finally on 23rd June, SCRWA received an SMS about its 1st payment for Parks from MCG.
PS: If you want to know the park committee members for your block, send an email to scrwa.ops@gmail.com (response time 1 working day)
by Ashwani Duggal ( GS SCRWA)
