TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: The 22nd meeting of the North Goa Zilla Panchayat was Friday rocked by agitated discussions on the lack of proper office, inadequate staff, shortage of a vehicles and the apparent callousness of the government in acting on proposals sent by the Chief Executive Officer.
Addressing media persons, ZP Adhyaksha Jayesh Salgaonkar lamented that a number of ZP’s proposals submitted to the government have been pending for far too long and were not being taken seriously by it.
“The impression goes around that the ZP members are there only to make demands and to have discussions. However, our office as of now has just one clerk with the remaining five who were initially assigned to us having moved out and got permanent jobs,” Salgaonkar said.
“There are 30 ZP constituencies in North Goa and we have only one vehicle and one clerk. We can’t function like this. Work orders have to be issued, estimates drawn and tendering processes done,” Salgaonkar argued, adding that for the 20 constituencies in South Goa they had two vehicles besides more staff.
“We have sent proposals so many times to the government, but these have not been acted upon. We have also met the minister, but still a lot of our proposals are pending,” Salgaonkar said.
The North Goa ZP has now decided to form a committee to follow up issues that they face with the various government departments and agencies.
The committee will be headed by the ZP Adhyaksha and have nine other members, to ensure that issues raised by the ZP members at the meetings do not remain on paper.
Salgaonkar said that the callousness of the government was one of the reasons why many of the ZP members were disheartened.
“Only about 18 of the 30 elected ZP members attended Friday’s meeting. It is mainly because many of them are disheartened that many of the ideas, proposals and plans that are put forth at this meeting, never see the light of the day,” Salgaonkar said.
