Election work, holiday to hurt LMC work all week

Times of India: Lucknow: Wednesday, 30 April 2014.

Since a large number of Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) officials have been deployed for election duty, official work ranging from birth and death registration, house tax payment, complaints redressal, road repair, fixing pipeline leakages and even answering RTI replies, will remain affected throughout the week.

LMC staff would also take due off on Parshuram Jayanti (May 1) and compensatory offs on following days which is bound to affect routine chores.

Usually, officials get 1-2 days off after elections but this time it is followed by the weekend, which means a prolonged delay to residents' complaints.

According to LMC, most officials have duties on polling booths, so no official task can be fulfilled this week. A senior official said "Official jobs like approving birth and death certificates, clearing house tax dues have been pending for long. RTI queries too are piling up in our office with no one to reply."

Officials said "though routine jobs like cleaning of roads, garbage collection, water supply and removal of dead animals from colonies will continue like before, action on time consuming jobs like repair of drains/ roads, cleaning of sewer lines, fixing of leakages might get delayed for few days."

LMC's headquarters in Lalbagh is also a polling centre, hence office would remain closed for two days in which no applications or requests would be entertained. Even LMC's complaint centre in Gomtinagar said minor grievances which can be looked after by class IV employees will be managed but the ones which require guidance by senior officials would be delayed.

The centre receives about 200 complaints on civic issues every day.

Since most staff from the centre has also been deployed in election duty, the redressal ratio of complaints has also dropped in the last few days.