Need to empower mayors: Devendra Fadnavis

Echoing the views of Congress leader Milind Deora and Yuva Sena chief Aditya Thackeray, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said that the mayor of a municipal corporation should be empowered more to make him perform better. Shiv Sena legislator and former mayor of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Sunil Prabhu welcomed the view and demanded that financial and administrative powers be delegated to mayors.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis is in London and was addressing chief executive officers of various corporate companies at the ‘Prabodhan Leaders Conclave 2015’ in London.

Though Mr Fadnavis has not made clear his intention regarding empowering mayors, a senior bureaucrat, on condition of anonymity, said that Mr Fadnavis, who was the mayor of Nagpur in the 1990s, would know the limitations of a mayor’s post.

Mr Fadnavis was the second youngest mayor elected in India, when he served as the mayor of Nagpur at the age of 27 in 1997. He is also the only person to be re-elected as the mayor in council of the state of Maharashtra.

Mr Prabhu had been demanding delegation of powers to the mayors for quite some time. “The post is like that of a toothless tiger. For every small work, the mayor has to seek permission of the municipal commissioner. This should be changed alongthe lines of London or New York, where the mayor has both administrative and financial powers.”

Mr Prabhu, a Sena legislator, who has served as the mayor of Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation, said, “The commissioner has the power to take a decision on proposals worth or below Rs 7 crore.”

“Those are the proposals which are favourable to contractors and administrative staff and which do not need the approval of standing committee,” Mr Prabhu added.

Meanwhile, speaking on the smart city project, Mr Fadnavis said, “Smart city is not merely about technology, but about involving people and understanding their needs.”

“We have to create jobs, provide new services and give better quality of life. We are building a new city, ‘Naina’, which will be bigger than Mumbai,” he said. While interacting with CEOs, Mr Fadnavis assured them that while creating infrastructure, there wouldn’t be problems in land acquisition, and cited the Navi Mumbai model of development.