Newly elected Chandigarh mayor holds forth on his designs for the city
Subhash Chawla has come a long way from his tumultuous beginnings as a Youth Congress leader to his present avatar as Chandigarh mayor. He tells Munish Dhiman about his plans to make Chandigarh a “world-class city”.
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19th Jan 2013
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Mayor Subhash Chawla in his office | Photo: T.S. Bedi
rom being one of the first oustees from the villages acquired for building the city, deemed as India's Paris in the fifties, Chandigarh's new mayor Subhash Chawla, has emerged as a leader who can deliver and lead people together ahead of the next parliamentary elections. Chawla, 58, is the son of a fodder seller refugee from Pakistan. His strategy to reach out to masses and build rapport with bureaucracy won him approval from his political mentor and Railways Minister Pawan Bansal.
Chawla shot into fame in 1978 when he was arrested for a month as a Youth Congress leader for forcibly breaking into the Cabinet room of the then Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and holding a mock Cabinet meeting. He along with other youths was arrested for trying to "forcibly capture power". He has been to jail for political reasons at least a score of times. The leader cherishes his stint in jail as his eldest child Sumit was born when he was incarcerated.
He has grown with Chandigarh, India's first modern urban experiment, and has witnessed the city evolve since its inception. Chawla strongly feels for the history of the original residents of Chandigarh and plans to create a museum dedicated to the pre-urbanisation times. With this he intends to ask for compensation and respect for the original residents. The museum would capture the evolution of life in the city and can become a landmark experiment for other cities to follow in the country, he believes.
While recalling this history, he shared a glorious part which may help people understand the contribution of women towards the city. He recalls that the government announced a policy for all those girls who had completed matriculation to open schools in the fifties and sixties. These schools ran from under trees and they numbered no less than a hundred. "The foundation of India's most literate place for decades had been laid by those young girls who ran those schools," he said. Political observers feel but for Chawla's love for Chandigarh, he could have been as important a Congress leader as Tariq Anwar and Harish Rawat who were his contemporary office bearers in the Youth Congress in their respective states.
He says, "My father married my mother in 1952 who hailed from Manimajra village, the place where the Oscar award winner director Katheryn Bigelow had created Abbotabad in the latest Hollywood flick Zero Dark Minutes, and my grandfather decided to settle in this new city signalling his aspirations for a new modern life away from the bloody past of the Partition." He also had those aspirations when he joined the Congress party in 1974, impressed with the personality of the slain Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's controversial son Sanjay Gandhi who had shared his dream of a modern India through his five-point programme.
Chawla was first elected to the City Mayoral post in 2003. He vividly recounts his maiden experience as the Mayor of Chandigarh "The excitement was beyond expression. After taking charge, I had a surfeit of challenges in store, which I took in my stride. The most vulnerable was to wipe out the 'non-functional' tag of the MC and to increase the polling percentage in MC elections, which had been minimal taking into account the earlier voting patterns. We finally succeeded in accomplishing the mission in a period spanning five years. I look back with a sense of fulfilment that I did whatever little I could in my capacity as a councillor and Mayor of the City."
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e quickly adds "We could see our cherished dreams-coming-true owing to the untiring efforts of the governing council. The unstable financial conditions faced by the corporation improved marginally. An additional financial grant got the administration's nod, which equipped it with the wherewithal to take on an unforeseen situation. Today, the budget stands at a whopping Rs 500 crore, in comparison with the 70-80 crore in the corporation's kitty. It is likely to rise by 100 crore during the next financial year".
About expectations of the City MP and Union Railways Minister, Pawan Kumar Bansal, Chawla adds, "He has great plans to convert Chandigarh into a world class city. The roadmap in the way of realizing this dream is riddled by certain technical hurdles, including the geographic limitations of Chandigarh, having a limited area. The other hiccup is the 100% bureaucratic set-up in the city. As for the extension of the airport and railway station, there is a great scope for connecting Chandigarh with the rest of the cities. This would go a long way in boosting tourism in the city by way of providing road network, better street lighting and, to cap it all, the well-designed entry points, etc."
As for the parking problem the city is currently faced with, he minces no words, "We are seized of the parking problem in the city. Though the provision of a multi level parking facility is on the current year's agenda," he goes on to say that it is a self-created problem as, "Chandigarh has a limited area of 10 km by 10 km with more than 4.5 lakh registered vehicles, which is perhaps nowhere in the country." With more than 3500 parks dotting the city, the proper upkeep of these neighbourhood parks have added to the corporation's major problems.
Chawla told Guardian20 that a host of new developmental projects are in the pipeline, which would be a New Year gift for city residents. The envisaged projects included the proposed bridge in sector 17, the extension of buildings located at different points to move them to one location for the smooth functioning of various offices, as also to deal with the ever-increasing parking problem, by putting in place the multi-level parking mechanism. The provision of a tertiary treated water plant to solve the problem of drinking water as waste water from sewerage can be treated and used for certain useful purpose, like gardening, etc reducing the wastage of drinking water.
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/newly-elected-chandigarh-mayor-holds-forth-on-his-designs-for-the-city
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