Team Herald
MARGAO: Carmona gram sabha while approving a deficit budget of Rs 59.20 lakh constituted a committee to identify prominent people from the village for felicitating them, even as villagers complained about the absence of elected panchayat members.
Sarpanch Allwyn Jorge said he could not force anybody to attend the gram sabha and pointed out that even villagers’ participation is minimal probably because the present panchayat causes no issues to be discussed.
Incidentally, there were only three panchayat members when the gram sabha commenced and the two women members including the Deputy Sarpanch Vailona Fernandes arrived half an hour after the gram sabha commenced. And Vailona left midway through the meeting.
The budget as approved projected total receipts of Rs 61.59 lakh with major receipts coming from grants that included Rs 7,000 per month for garbage management, Rs 6.50 lakh from house tax and Rs 6 lakh from garbage collection fees.
But the expenditure is pegged at Rs 1.16 crore with Rs 30 lakh earmarked for development works that include roads and drains and Rs 3 lakh to purchase garbage bags. The panchayat aims at tackling the garbage issue by providing Rs 5 lakhs to purchase baling machine, Rs 5 lakh for composting machine and Rs 3 lakh to purchase a rickshaw to collect garbage from the village.
The sarpanch announced that the panchayat has decided not to collect Trade tax in future and instead whoever is conducting any trade in the village will have to get a trade license that is renewable every year. The light tax has also been abolished as the government has taken on itself the payment for street lights.
The panchayat agreed to undertake temporary work on the ground by using daily wage workers so that the locals can have the proposed football training on the ground as the proposal to GSIDC to undertake the work is not being processed for many years.
Allwyn agreed to discuss the village tinto case with the advocate and the villagers asked him to get the status of all the cases pending in courts and also the next date of their hearing, so that, some villagers can follow up these matters.
“The advocate is not responding to the panchayat correspondence and in fact has not even submitted his bills for the last two years despite many requests,” Allwyn said.
The gram sabha agreed to issue a willingness letter to the owner of the land adjacent to the panchayat ghar as there is no sufficient setback from the panchayat house and the sarpanch was asked to issue the letter while stating that the area of land to be purchased would be decided after comparing documents and survey boundaries.
Even as the sarpanch was accused of resorting to ‘delaying tactics’ over approving the committee constituted to decide upon Zalor matter, Allwyn admitted that he did not have the names of the members of the committee as he forgot to bring that particular letter.
The gram sabha then decided to approve the committee relying upon the sarpanch to provide the names of the members. This matter was discussed quite heatedly with two villagers taking divergent stands but agreeing at the end.
