The important meeting of the Finance and Contractual Committee (F&CC) scheduled to be held on Thursday evening was once again postponed. All the proposals for revenue generation and other works of the city have to be passed by the F&CC committee and the meeting is held under the leadership of mayor and MC commissioner. However, Mayor Harcharan Singh Gohalwaria said that it was due to unavailability of the MC commissioner that the meeting was postponed. Even after two years of MC elections that took place in 2012 and the new House was formed, it has failed to elect two councillor members to the committee which is mandatory as per the Punjab Municipal Act, 1976. The members have to be chosen either through elections or unanimous decision of the House. But the present House has failed to take a decision. Even local bodies secretary Punjab Ashok Gupta had pointed out the Ludhiana MC for “not completing constitutional procedures” few months back. The committee without two councillor members is continuing with meetings giving an excuse that deputy mayor R D Sharma and senior deputy mayor Sunita Aggarwal are ex-officio members of the committee. In another attempt to elect two councillors, the issue once again has been included in the agenda of the coming House meeting. The mayor told Newsline, “I know that the matter has been delayed beyond limit. Members should have been elected by now but we failed to build a consensus. Now we have put this item on the agenda of the coming House meeting. Hopefully, elections will be held soon.” Even the BJP, the alliance partner of SAD, said that councillor members should be elected immediately. “It’s been more than two years and we failed to elect two councillors unanimously. It is a headache of the mayor to do it,” said BJP councillor Inder Aggarwal. Congress spokesperson Parminder Mehta said, “The meeting was cancelled due to lack of coordination between the mayor and commissioner. Earlier, too, the issue relating to election of councillor members was raised in House meeting but with zero result.”
