PANJIM: Corporation of the City of Panaji (CCP) on Friday passed Rs 101.67 crore budget for the financial year 2022-2023.
Presenting the budget, CCP mayor Rohit Monserrate said that the budget had increased by 37.87 per cent as compared to the last financial year. It’s a surplus budget of Rs 14 crore, he said.
The meeting convened to discuss and pass the budget turned stormy after councillors shouted that they were not getting firm answers from the account recovery officer (ATO) regarding the amount recovered from the casinos over installation of signboards in the city.
Former mayor Surendra Furtado alleged that the budget was copy and paste exercise and that they were not getting prompt replies from the ATO regarding recovery. It implies that the budget has been copy pasted from the previous data without carrying out the detailed study, he said.
Furtado further grilled the technical team for not maintaining a proper record of logbook pertaining to amount of fuel utilised by the solid waste management (SWM) vehicles. Alleging that the tracking system of SWM was deliberately tampered, another former Mayor Uday Madkaikar said that the fault does not lie in the technical system but is lying in the technical team handling it. He suggested installation of mobile app showing the travel status of SWM vehicles in the cell phones of the Mayor and Commissioner for real-time monitoring.
Madkaikar said that though the budget was surplus, there were doubts whether the Corporation will be able to make the required recovery.
Former deputy mayor and ruling councillor Vasant Agshikar alleged scam in outsourcing of water tankers by the Corporation. He said that the CCP is spending Rs one crore every year for outsourcing of water tankers and suspected that incurring such a huge amount on outsourcing water tankers a big scam.
Adding to this Furtado said that collecting sopo from the vendors selling their goods inside the Panjim market and allowing those sell their goods at the roadside and the footpath without paying sopo was wrong and was against the rules of the CCP.
Furtado demanded that the CCP should appoint dedicated team for the purpose of recovery in a timely manner.
