Palakkad: Hopeful of turning around the governance stalemate in Palakkad Municipality, the BJP councillors elected Pramila Sasidharan, one of the senior councillors from the party, as the new chairpersons of the civic body on Monday morning.
Pramila secured all the NDA votes – 28, while the UDF candidate Mini Babu won 17 votes including one from the Welfare Party, LDF’s Usha MV won seven votes. There were cross-voting incidents. Meanwhile, the opposition walked out of the oath ceremony of the new chairperson, without any notification. There was an embarrassing moment for the BJP members as well, when the outgoing chairperson Priya Ajayan left the ceremony without wishing Sasidharan.
It was only on Saturday morning that the BJP-RSS leadership reached a consensus to field Sasidharan. Though the leadership discussed a few names for the post including Minimol VS from Koppam ward and a few councillors stood for Priya again, the final decision favoured Sasidharan, who was BJP's first-ever municipal chairperson in Kerala when the party created history by winning the local elections in 2015. Even though the RSS batted for a new face to the post, the BJP leadership and a section of the councillors supported Sasidharan.
The governance in the municipality had literally come to a standstill following the infighting of BJP councillors. It was largely alleged that Priya Ajayan took unilateral decisions on various works being carried out in BJP wards without having any with the respective councillors. Days before Priya resigned the post, the party saw three ruling members – Pramila Sasidharan, senior leader LV Gopalakrishnan and Smithesh – walking out of the council and even then, the chairperson did not relent.
Talking to Onmanorama, Sasidharan said that the immediate attention would be to hold gramasabhas so as to prepare Plan Fund projects for the next year. “The immediate efforts would be to restart the pending civic works and prepare projects for the next Plan Fund,” she said.
At the same time, sources from the municipality administration said preparing projects before the Lok Sabha notification is purely impossible. “It would take at least four months to conduct gramasabhas, proposing projects, vetting it, reworking those projects after conducting the civic body development seminar, etc. By that time, the Lok Sabha elections would be declared. The Plan Fund works can only be restarted in June. By the time the projects are listed out, the council would be facing yet another local body election in 2025. The governing body simply wasted the current year due to infightings,” said the officer, adding that the municipality has not spent even 20 per cent of the Plan Fund allocated for the current year.
