Saturday, October 15, 2011

55 councillors kept mum during Chennai corporation council meeting: Study


C Shivakumar
Chennai:
Fifty-five councilors, including 38 from the DMK party, did not pose any questions during the Corporation Council meetings from January 2007 to 2011, according to a report by Transparent Chennai.

The report said that a total of 458 questions were asked in the council meetings and councilor D Subhash Chandra Bose, DMK, asked the most questions (18) followed by P L Kalyani (Congress), Usha (DMDK), and S
Umasasavi (BSP) posed 17 queries, and S Venkatesan (PMK) asked 16 questions.

The councilors from the parties with the smallest representation asked the largest average number of questions, suggesting that perhaps the allocation of questions by party skews the question hour in favor of extremely small parties, the study by Transparent Chennai said.

“The high number of questions from parties with just one to three Councilors in the Council also allays fears that electing an independent or a non-ruling party councilor will decrease your ward’s voice in the Council, at least in the matter of questions,” the study added.

Similarly, at the Council meeting, after the question hour where councilors get a chance to make speeches to the Council about matters regarding their ward and city-related
problems, the last speakers were almost always the PMK leader M Jayaraman, Opposition leader Saidai P Ravi and the ruling party leader N Ramalingam, the study observed.

In the 58 meetings that took place from January 2007 to May 2011, 844 speeches were made by the Councilors.
M Jayaraman spoke 40 times; Saidai P Ravi 48 times
and N Ramalingam spoke 47 times. Apart from them, V Prabu of the BSP has spoken the most with 36 speeches followed by P Devi of CPI (M) with 33 speeches.

While MLA’s S V Sekhar spoke four times and VS Babu spoke twice, 28 councilors did not speak at any of the meetings. Of these Councilors, 25 were from the DMK, two
from the PMK and one from DMDK.

The data was culled manually from the Council proceedings Official Reports from the month of January 2007 to May 2011

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