Our Correspondent
Ludhiana,
Though Congress councillors have demanded the transfer of
municipal commissioner G.S. Ghuman, BJP MLA Satpal Gosain
has come to his rescue.
Talking to The Tribune, Gosain said: “Ghuman hardly got
the time to work since he joined the municipal corporation
only a few months ago. For the past two months, he had been
busy with sangat darshan programmes and got very less time
to concentrate on his office.”
He said Congress councillors did not come together for
“corrupt” persons, but levelled allegations against a
person who was humble and was trying to usher in an era of
development in the city.
Gosain said let Ghuman work for at least a year and then
point a finger at his working.
Similarly, senior deputy mayor Praveen Bansal said the MC
commissioner was an energetic and committed official who
wanted to bring transparency in the working of the municipal
corporation.
He added that due to some recent issues like grouping of
tenders, proposal for giving advertisement of Sarabha Nagar
to the market association of the area which was rejected and
allotting advertisements of the city to a single contractor
had lead to such a situation.
Terming it as a political gimmick, SAD councillor Jagbir
Singh Sokhi said the Congress councillors had picked up the
issue in wake of the coming parliamentary elections.
He said Ghuman was an efficient officer and he had never
said no to anyone, be it a common man or a councillor. He
had always attended to everyone and had never refused to do
the work of Congress councillors who got their work done by
meeting him personally.
He added that since Ghuman had not done anything wrong,
there was no question of his transfer.
A
decade-long wait
Our Correspondent
Ludhiana,
It took 10 years for the memorial of Kartar Singh Sarabha to
come up as it remained a victim of official apathy.
Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal had inaugurated work
on it in 1998 when his government had come to power. He had
released a grant of Rs 10 lakh for it, but then it was
forgotten.
When the Congress came to power, the then Chief Minister,
Capt Amarinder Singh, released Rs 35 lakh for it in 2003.
However, no progress was made on the memorial.
Work on it started only a fortnight ago again so that its
inauguration could coincide with Sarabha Sports Festival
conducted in the village in the martyr’s memory every
year.
The work had begun in 2001 when the martyr’s cousin,
Bibi Jagdish Kaur, recipient of the “Punjab Mata” title,
threatened to renounce the title if the work was not
started. She had threatened to sit on a dharna in front of
the residence of Parkash Singh Badal.
The 95-year-old cousin of the martyr had also threatened
to stop accepting a Rs 2,500 honorarium that the government
had been giving to her every month. She had said the honour
did not mean anything to her if the government had forgotten
the sacrifice of her brother.
The threat came as a wake-up call to the government and
it started work on it. Later, she died and work came to a
standstill again.
A few days ago, the XEN, PWD, was asked to expedite the
work so that the memorial could be dedicated to the nation
on martyrdom day that fell today.
While the conservation work on the ground floor of the
martyr’s ancestral house has been completed, the first
floor is still to be taken care of. The archaeological
department of Punjab had declared that the house should be
protected as a monument in 1998, after which it remained
abandoned for want of repair.
