No specific plan for integrated bus stand

Replete with reiteration of some long-pending proposals, the Tiruchi Corporation budget for 2012-13 has also failed to come up with a concrete plan for establishing an integrated bus stand in the city.

The budget reiterates, in general terms, its now familiar resolve to set up the integrated bus stand in the city. No financial allocation has been made nor has the site been specified. Interestingly, the project has been a regular feature in almost every budget of the corporation over the past decade, with token allocations being made for the purpose on some occasions.

Several other ‘announcements' in the budget also make for a repetition of some of the pending projects. Proposals on modernising the slaughter house for goats and the fish market, both near the Gandhi Market, were promised last year too. The civic body has allotted Rs.2 crore each for the two projects in the budget now.

Similarly, the budget reiterates the corporation decision to go in for a scientific closure of the over 12 lakh tonnes of accumulated solid waste at its dumping yard at Ariyamangalam.

In 2010, the corporation had announced a plan to compact the accumulated waste and create a hillock with high quality grass being cultivated over it.

The project was to be on the lines of the one taken up in Coimbatore under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

The corporation has now made an allocation of Rs.5 crore for the project, which seeks to minimise the environmental impact in the Ariyamangalam area.

The move to create a GIS-based system for planning has been an initiative which has been set in motion twice over the past few years. On both occasions, it failed to reach the commissioning stage.

The budget also reaffirms a commitment to extend the underground drainage scheme, for which the TWAD Board was already preparing the project estimates, to the uncovered parts of the city at a total estimate of about Rs.750 crore.

Though the corporation has managed to bring down its deficit in the revised estimates for 2011-12, no revenue generating measures has been outlined in the budget. The standard affirmation on initiating steps to improve tax collection and expeditious settlement of legal disputes (on tax assessments) finds a mention in this budget too.

Bereft of its own resources, the corporation has to perennially look to government or funding agencies for implementing capital works. While 48 per cent of the corporation revenue receipts would come by way of devolutionary funds from the government, about 69 per cent of its revenue expenditure would go towards salaries and pension. Property tax and other tax heads account for just 19 per cent of the revenue receipts.