Corpn resolutions online after 4 yrs

Coimbatore: The city corporation has started uploading resolutions on the official website again after a four-year gap. The decade-old practice was abruptly stopped in July 2017. The civic body has now uploaded all the resolutions it has passed between July 2017 and January 2018 on the website.

Corporation commissioner Raja Gopal Sunkara said uploading of resolutions on the website was a routine procedure that was followed by all the other corporations in the state. “They upload resolutions without any delay. The same procedure will be followed here as well.”

Until recently, the corporation had been making some excuses for not uploading the resolutions on the website, despite several requests in this regard and an order from the Tamil Nadu Local Bodies Ombudsman.

A resolution is a document containing all the details about a project - the bidder selected, cost and exact design, among other details.

RTI activist S P Thiyagarajan, who had moved the high court seeking intervention in the matter, welcomed the move and requested the corporation to upload all the pending resolutions on the website.

He said the corporation had stopped uploading the resolutions on the website almost eight months after dissolving the local body council in October 2016, when the commissioner took charge as the special officer. “Since then, there was no transparency in its works. It seems the corporation was under political pressure not to upload the resolutions on the website. Now that the government has changed, officials have started uploading the same.”

Since the documents would be on the public domain henceforth, malpractices in the corporation works, if any, could be easily detected by the public, the activist said.

Based on Thiyagarajan’s petition, which was filed on August 24, 2018, the Tamil Nadu Local Bodies Ombudsman had directed the corporation to upload all the resolutions on the official website immediately. But in February 2019, then corporation commissioner K Vijayakarthikeyan had sought time till the second week of May to upload the resolutions, citing works were on to upgrade the website. The ombudsman had sought an explanation from the commissioner of municipal administration when the corporation failed to upload the resolutions even after the extension of time it had sought. Since nothing changed on the ground, the activist moved the high court later that year.