Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Mumbai best MLAs: Congress gets four of 5 top ranks in survey

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.