Gujarat Confidential: Civic engagement

Aiming at ensuring the participation of students as well as the teaching community of Surat city in developing services for residents, the Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC) has announced the proposed launch of a portal – My Dear MaNaPa (My Dear Municipal Corporation) – in its annual draft budget presented recently. The portal will be accessible to students, teachers and principals of Class 9-12 of Suman Schools (run by the SMC). They will be provided User IDs to access the portal on which relevant details of the SMC will be displayed. They can submit suggestions on what more can be done for the SMC. Students will also be given hard copies for submitting inputs. Surat Municipal Commissioner M Nagarajan said, “Through this concept, we can get more ideas from the students and others for what more to be done in the city and which services could be expanded and make it effective for the public. We will collect suggestions and seeing feasibility, we will work on these.”