RWAs form ward committees before MCD polls

New Delhi, Feb 17 (UNI) In an effort to effectively act as a'pressure group', Resident Welfare Associations from 20 wards in the capital have submitted their list of ward committee members to a specially created secretariat by the NGO People's Action to support the campaign for good governance.

RWAs had a duty to involve themselves in the process so that honest and not corrupt people entered the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, elections to which would be held shortly, chief campaign coordinator R C Kamboj said.

The coming weekend would see more RWAs from other wards forwarding names of ward committee members to the secretariat, said Mr Atul Goyal, campaign coordinator and a member of United RWAs Joint Action, an apex network of over 500 resident welfare associations across the city.

Mr Sharad Dixit, another coordinator, said the movement was picking up steam in almost all areas. Once people understood that this procedure was a methodology of enhancing the quality of candidates and ensuring that residents had a say in the selection process, they would embrace the idea with full vigour.

''Ward Committees will soon start on the second step of the process, which is inviting applications from desirous candidates, but we are awaiting official declaration of wards from the state Election Commission,'' Mr Goyal said.

According to the rules of the procedure, applications must come in before a cut-off date that ward committees would give out in advance. After that, a preliminary check into the candidates' background would be conducted and if approved, the candidate dossier would be sent to an independent expert panel constituted from the members of the New Delhi People Alliance (NDPA), an alliance of 30 civil society organisations.

Once the NDPA panel recommendations were received, ward committee would distribute the information about candidates to the ward, while candidates would be free to mobilise support for themselves until the date of 'primary elections' when at a public meeting called by the ward committee, a representative group of residents would vote for the best candidate, who would then be selected as the consensus choice.

People Action President Sanjay Kaul said this was a system of ensuring clean politics and good governance by involving the stakeholders in the most important democratic procedure of all elections.

And the response of RWAs across Delhi only went to prove that people wanted a better system of governance, he added.

UNI