MOST chiefs of utility service providing organisations do not attend coordination meetings called by the Mayor of Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) defying an order of the Prime Minister’s Office. The government in a gazette over two years ago asked chiefs of all utility service providers in Dhaka to attend coordination meetings to make decisions in consultation with each other.
The initiative was aimed for bringing dynamism among the utility service providers and complied with the Local Government Act, 2009, a PMO circular said. The DSCC on May 14 this year had sent a letter to the PMO mentioning the absenteeism prevalent in the coordination meetings. DSCC Mayor called three coordination meetings following the PMO order. But many of the officials sent their representatives who didn’t have the authority to take any policy decisions.
Only two of 27 chiefs of utility service providers attended the first meeting on August 3, 2016, at Nagar Bhaban. Five chiefs attended the second one on November 12, 2017, and six attended the next on April 9 this year. The departments also did not inform the DSCC about the implementation or progress of any decisions taken in the meetings. As a result, the meetings remained ineffective.
It is important to bring all utility service providers under one umbrella and reduce bureaucratic tangles for obvious reasons. The main aim of coordinating different utility departments is to make instant policy decisions. It would be possible for all utility providers to dig new lines at the exact same time that roads are renovated–if this is done the roads need to be dug up only once a year. For example if a road is renovated the presence of the utility lines must be clearly delineated to avoid explosions or shortcuts.
But we see that roads are dug up many times — once for each service provider, eg electricity or gas or fibre optics. This creates unnecessary harassment for citizens who are already dealing with a hugely overburdened road system which is quite incapable of handling the huge amounts of vehicles in Dhaka. It is time that the utility service providers would act in a coordinated way.
