Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Union Surface Transport and Shipping Minister and Nagpur MP Nitin Gadkari on Friday convened a special meeting on Nagpur projects and problems on the state legislature premises in Nagpur, deciding to clear all the held-up projects and proposals submitted by Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) and Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT) to the state government. The most important decision taken at the meeting was to set up a committee to suggest how charges applied by the irrigation department for supply of water to all municipal bodies of the state be waived off. “The irrigation charges money for loss of irrigation caused due to supply of water to municipal bodies. It was decided to check if those charges could be waived off,” said a senior official. The issue of Nagpur’s roads both proposed and existing ones also came up for discussion with the CM assuring to expedite release of Rs 100 crore grant immediately, the official said. An idea to hand over the layouts under NIT jurisdiction to NMC to facilitate development works was also accepted in the meeting. “It was decided to allow corporators to carry out developmental activities in those layouts,” the official added. Nagpur has the rare distinction of having two civic bodies - NMC and NIT. There has been a demand to disband NIT to end the dual authority regimen. Handing over of the NIT layout’s development to NMC could be the beginning of the end of NIT reign, but the officials refused to concede it. Nagpur has over 2500 unauthorised layouts, which account for about one-third of city’s population. The dual authority often creates developmental logjams. Fadnavis has already mooted the idea of NIT being converted to Nagpur Metropolitan Region Development Authority (NMRDA) on the lines of MMRDA. Gadkari suggested that development of congested old city areas can be done as per a plan prepared by CIDCO and suggested that NMC should seek CIDCO’s advice.
