Times of India: Mumbai: Wednesday, August 09, 2017.
People's
perception of corruption among MLAs from Mumbai and their performance has gone
down, says a survey conducted by Praja Foundation, an NGO working towards
enabling accountable governance.
According to
the survey , findings of which were released on Tuesday , 38% of respondents
felt the government and MLAs were extremely corrupt -last year, 36% felt so. On
a scale of 1 to 10, the average perceived level of corruption among MLAs
deteriorated from 7.23 in 2016 to 6.87 this year -a little above 6.81, the
average score between 2011-14 when the BJP-Shiv Sena government was elected.
Praja also
released a report card of Mumbai MLAs, which showed four of the five
top-performing legislators are from the Congress, and the remaining one from
the Shiv Sena. All the bottom five ranks have gone to legislators from the
ruling BJP-Shiv Sena. The ratings covered 32 of the 36 MLAs, with the four
legislators who are ministers not being included.
Congress MLA
from Mumbadevi, Amin Patel, topped the chart for the second consecutive year
with a score of 78.25 (see table for scoring system).However, his score has
drop ped from 84.33% last year. "I have worked closely with BMC to get
things done in my constituency . A lot of things can be done if you know the
functioning of BMC, which I do as I was a corporator for a long time,"
said Patel. At the other end, Ghatkopar West MLA Ram Kadam, who recently joined
BJP , has been ranked 32 with a score of 41.96.
This is the
second survey of current MLAs. Ranking was not done in 2015, the year
immediately after the polls.The parameters included attendance, number of
questions asked and the quality of questions. All the information was sought
under the RTI A sizeable score was for public perception --of corruption,
accessibility of MLAs, quality of life and services provided by
government-which was calculated through survey of 20,000 people. "It was
found that when the perception level of corruption increases the perception of
quality of life goes down.Which can be seen this year," said Nitai Mehta,
founder of Praja. This year, 66% of respondents felt the quality of life has
improved, while 70% felt so last year. "The score reducing again indicates
rising disillusionment with the current MLAs," said Mehta.
Avg score
of MLAs goes down
The average
score of MLAs from Mumbai has reduced to 60.5% from 65.1% in the 2016 survey by
the NGO, Praja Foundation. Meanwhile, the corruption index too has gone up.
"In 2017, as many as 12 MLA's (33%) have chargesheets filed against
them," said Milind Mhaske, project director at Praja foundation.