The city's guardian angel

"I believe in letting my work do the talking and am rather shy of the media,� says Sanjay Kumar, Commissioner, Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC).
It’s been six months since he took over from T C Benjamin as the youngest municipal commissioner Pune has ever had.
Kumar thinks otherwise about being called the youngest. “It is not a great qualification to be the youngest.The work you do must matter,� he feels.
When PT met Sanjay Kumar just after he had taken over, transparency in the system with a focus on traffic congestion and pollution were his key areas of focus. Now, after six months, Kumar believes that he is slowly working towards showing results. It may take 10 years, but he claims to have set up the agenda to provide a better system for the PMC to work with.
“The first thing I did was to prioritise issues and streamline the system. We have introduced innovative schemes like the fast track system which allows licensed architects to get building approvals within 24 hours, collection of property tax through web-enabled services, we roped in Microsoft for our portal solutions and partially computerised octroi services,� Kumar states.
Kumar has closely scrutinised the traffic congestion problem in the city. He has developed an integrated road development programme worth Rs 750 crore.
Kumar is also working with the Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) to improve public transport.
Kumar lays emphasis on energy conversion projects for which he feels the Build Operate Transfer (BOT) system is preferred. Prior to this posting, Kumar has worked with the Woman and Child Welfare board and the Electricity Regulatory board.
It took him a month to get a feel of Pune when he was posted here. It wasn’t all that difficult though, as he fell in love with Pune 10 years ago when he was in the city on a training at Yashada, near Raj Bhavan.
“I had decided back then to retire in this beautiful city,� he says.
Kumar is a huge cricket fan and even has an autographed Sachin Tendulkar T-shirt displayed in his room and knows statistics of almost all matches played since 1975.
A voracious news analyst he has a separate television installed in his house on which only news and cricket are watched. “I was so crazy about the BBC that my father gifted me a transistor when I was young. It remains my most valued gift,� Kumar adds.
prachi.bari@timesgroup.com