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From The Mayor's Desk

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation has continued to serve the citizens of Kolkata, covering more than 4.6 Mn static and another 6 Mn floating population. Even though it has done a commendable job in the past, there is a lot of scope for improvement and perfection. It's time that we start dreaming big for the city. A city of Kolkata's history, heritage and lineage deserves to be rated as a world class city in terms of quality of life that it offers. We begin our humble journey with this ambitious, but achievable vision in mind.


In keeping with the growing needs of its burgeoning population and increasing expectations and aspirations of the citizens, the KMC, in the recent years, has embarked on large scale development of city's civic infrastructure as well as strengthening of its institutional capacity to serve its citizens better. We have to consolidate the work that has already been completed in the area of water generation, solid waste disposal, roads infrastructure, management of parks and squares and presentation/ augmentation of greenery in the city. However, some key concern areas have remained unresolved and the same would draw our immediate attention and focus.


One key concern has been multiplicity of state and central parastatal agencies providing similar or related civic services to the citizens of Kolkata. Such multiplicity reduces accountability, increases confusion in the citizen's mind and often makes coordinated service delivery an onerous task. We believe that a city of Kolkata's size, importance and complexity deserves a more empowered civic body with wider ambit of services, that can be made accountable for most of the civic services and amenities that citizens expect on their day to day life. Such strengthening of the elected local government would also be in line with the 74th Constitutional Amendment.


Another key concern area has been the pace of progress of some of the large scale funded development programs that have been undertaken, including ADB funded KEIP program and various development projects under JNNURM. We will continuously thrive to bring these programs and projects on track, align them with needs and expectations of the citizens and ensure that these are completed in a time bound manner, thereby improving quality of life of the citizens by delivery of expected results.


We would also like to ensure that benefits of these projects and all other development initiatives to be taken up by us reach all strata of the society and progresses made be inclusive and equitable. Hence, great emphasis will be put on social sector development including slum improvement and implementation of minority development programs. Emphasis would also be made to improve city's health and hygiene thorough focused initiatives in vector control and overall improvement in sanitation and cleanliness.


Last but not the least, our constant endeavour would be to ensure that this journey to prosperity and development should not put additional burden on the citizens. We strongly believe that by streamlining and simplifying the tax system, KMC would ensure better compliance and coverage, so that its overall revenue targets are met without posing additional burdens on individual complying citizens. We will thrive to introduce a modern regime of simplified tax structure that will root out corruption and ensure better compliance.


We promise to offer a transparent and responsive civic administration, leveraging on the latest initiatives in IT and e-governance. We also promise that all our councillors and civic officials would be in constant contact with the citizens, would be accessible and focused on providing better services to you.


Thus, we begin our journey with blessings of all the citizens of Kolkata. I sincerely invite all of you to join hands with us and help us make this city a world class one. Without your active involvement and participation, such dream can never be fulfilled.



Sri FIRHAD HAKIM
Mayor of Kolkata