Study tour for Corp councillors and staffs
All the councillors in the Coimbatore Corporation and 30 officials and staff members will visit 12 cities in the west and northern parts of the country to study various infrastructure development schemes being implemented under the Union Urban Development Ministry’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.The places are among the 63 cities where the mission is being implemented.This will not be a pleasure trip. Best practices in these cities will have to be made note of and applied back home, says Mayor R. Venkatachalam.The councillors should be able to tell the people in their wards the benefits of the schemes they studied in these cities.Four teams of 18 councillors each will visit these cities.The first team will go to Ahmedabad, Surat and Ankleshwar in Gujarat, the second to Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, the third to New Delhi, Jodhpur and Jaipur (both in Rajasthan) and Sirsa (Haryana) and the fourth to Mumbai and Pune in Maharashtra.They will leave the city on December 23 and return on December 27. Mayor, Deputy Mayor The Mayor, Deputy Mayor N. Karthik and Corporation Commissioner P. Muthuveeran will fly from one city to the other to join all the teams on different days, Mr. Venkatachalam said.The mission has a component called PEARL (Peer Experience and Reflective Learning) that calls for all the 63 cities to learn from each other’s experience.
The objective of the PEARL programme is to create networks among JNNURM cities for cross learning and sharing of knowledge on urban reforms and city governance.The mission believes that this will help in achieving its objectives and thereby make cities more liveable, economically vibrant, and environmentally sustainable.In order to accomplish this, the JNNURM cities have been formed into several subgroups according to the similarity of their socio-economic profiles, complexities of urban problems and issues, size and urban growth patterns.The Mayor says that the Corporation teams will study various areas such as the maintenance and beautification of water bodies, underground drainage projects, solid waste management components such as door-to-door collection and disposal through landfill and 24-hour supply of drinking water.These are the basic services that most of the cities intend to provide or improve.Therefore, the trip will provide enough opportunity for cross-learning.“We will invite teams from these cities to visit Coimbatore,” he says.
