CORPORATION STATUS PROCESS INITIATED: TAMANG Fresh shot at civic upgrade

VIVEK CHHETRI TT, 23 Jul 2019, Darjeeling: Binay Tamang, the president of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (Binay camp), on Monday said the state government had started the process to upgrade Darjeeling municipality into a corporation and a bill was likely to be placed in the next Assembly session.

The Darjeeling municipality is the second oldest civic body in Bengal and was established in 1850.

The demand for upgrading the hill civic body has gone through various phases with earlier leaders in power having rejected the offer.

Tamang said: "I met state urban development and municipal affairs department minister Firhad Hakim in Calcutta today and he informed me that the state government had initiated process to upgrade Darjeeling municipality into a corporation. He  added: "The minister said that there was every likelihood that a bill would be placed in the Assembly during the next session. The hill leader said that while the Siliguri municipality, which was set up in 1949, was already a corporation, one of the oldest civic bodies in the state was yet to be accorded the status. The Darjeeling municipality was upgraded from D category to A in 1998.

The corporation issue had taken the hills by storm in 2001. D.K. Pradhan, who was then the GNLF chairperson of the Darjeeling municipality and the brain behind the initiative to upgrade the municipality, was forced to resign from his civic post and ultimately from the party because of the corporation issue.

Speculation did the rounds then that Subash Ghisingh, the GNLF president and the chairman of Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, was uncomfortable of the power that the corporation and its mayor might wield.

The Left Front was in favour of upgrading the Darjeeling civic body. On February 2, 2000, A.K. Dutta, the then secretary of the municipal affairs department had said in a memo that the state government was considering the upgradation. But Ghisingh developed cold feet towards the proposal.

The corporation issue sparked a controversy within the GNLF then. The party announced a one-person-one post policy and asked Pradhan to resign as the chairman of the civic body.

Pradhan was then the MLA of Darjeeling, too. Pradhan rebelled and had got the majority of the GNLF ward commissioners on his side only to be betrayed at the last moment.

The new municipality board passed a resolution in 2003, stating that it did not want corporation status for Darjeeling.

On Monday, Tamang said: "We are now hopeful that the Darjeeling municipality will finally be upgraded into a corporation by next year. The Darjeeling municipality once used to manage hospitals, 52 schools, fire services and electricity. The management of electricity was, however, taken over by the state government on January 30, 1978.

The schools were subsequently transferred to the DGHC after it was formed in 1988.