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Six mayors to join hands on city government plan

STAFF CORRESPONDENT
Mayors of the country's six city corporations will jointly put forward to the government a proposal for city or metropolitan government.
"We the mayors of the six city corporations will have a meeting within the next few months to formulate a joint plan for the corporations.
Then we will submit it to the government," DCC Mayor Sadeque Hossain Khoka told reporters at a programme yesterday at the Dhaka Reporters' Unity auditorium.
"It may be named either a 'city government' or anything like that," Khoka said about the system first proposed by former DCC mayor
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Mohammad Hanif and recently by Chittagong City Corporation Mayor ABM Mohiuddin Chowdhury.
Asked about his failures as a mayor during the three years of his office since May 15, 2002, Khoka blamed it on the limitations of a mayor and the "ancient" conditions of the infrastructure and administration of the DCC.
Regarding the utility service organisations, he said although the water supply in other city corporations is under the authority of the mayor concerned, the case is different in Dhaka.
"There are no public representatives in the Water and Sewerage Authority [Wasa], Dhaka Electricity Supply Authority [Desa] and the Titas Gas. So these organisations go without accountability for their work to the people," Khoka said.
About the suffering of the citizens caused by rampant road-digging, the mayor said that the work hopefully will end by this month. Regarding the problem of waterlogging he mentioned the Wasa, not the DCC, as the responsible authority.
Khoka said the situation of the DCC was so bad when he took office that there were no funds left even for the payment of its staff. Besides, there was the debt of Tk 631 crore on the DCC. The condition of many roads was dilapidated and people did not have any faith in the DCC.
"At first I tried to bring back the confidence of the citizens. I have so far paid off 80 percent of the debt and now the DCC has its own fund to run its regular development works," Khoka said.
On the issue of mosquito control the mayor said, "We don't claim we
have been able to control mosquito fully but the situation has now improved a lot. We concentrated on cleaning up the ponds and water pits in the city, which are the breeding grounds of mosquito."
On the conservancy work of the DCC the mayor said if the DCC had been allotted Tk 180 crore yearly instead of the current 60 crore for this purpose, the city would have looked different. The DCC earns Tk 17 crore only for the conservancy purpose from the citizens, he informed.
Besides, the DCC lacks cleaners required proportionate to the population of Dhaka. For an estimated population of one crore under the DCC, the organisation needs 20,000 cleaners instead of the existing 7,000, Khoka said.
He said the DCC recently gave the conservancy work of 10 wards to private organisations so that the DCC workers could compare their works in other wards and improve in a competitive way.
Khoka admitted that Dhaka has not been built in a planned way. "In future we have to make towns around Dhaka through a proper plan," he said adding that in the next 10 to 15 years towns will be built centring around Keraniganj, Savar, Gazipur and the eastern side nearby the Sitalakkha river.
Khoka also shed light on some future work plans under which the DCC will construct some new roads, start the work of the Jatrabari-Gulistan fly-over very soon and the development of the Osmani Udyan this month.
Among others, DRU President M Shafiqul Bashar and General Secretary Shakhawat Hossain Badsha attended the programme.