Media release
Mangaluru, Feb 24: With the Mangaluru City Corporation (MCC) gearing up to operationalize its Ward Committees (WC) across 60 wards in the city, a workshop on conducting effective ward committee meetings was held for the ward secretaries by Janaagraha on Thursday, February 24.
The workshop was conducted at MCC by the Karnataka programme lead for Civic Participation Santosh Nargund from Janaagraha, communication consultant Harsha Raj Gatty with the cooperation of the MCC staff.
MCC had recently nominated the ward secretaries for all the wards to look into the functionalities of the ward committees. These committees play a key role in making the partnership between citizens and the city government successful. MCC has identified the third week of every month for the conduction of ward committee meetings headed by the ward corporator (xhairman) and will be held in venues convenient to the members, in their respective wards.
The nominated secretaries will call the meetings in each of the 60 wards, with the concurrence of the chairman. The role and functions of ward secretaries will include listing the agenda for the meeting after consulting Corporators and WC members, facilitating the meeting, and providing the documents required for discussion. They will also carry on the responsibility of recording the minutes of the meeting.
As a follow up measure, the secretaries will present the Action Taken Report on the resolutions made in the subsequent meetings. They will serve as a backbone to support the ward corporators and aid MCC to address the development, service & infrastructural challenges faced by the people across all wards.
Janaagraha had earlier conducted ward committee workshops for corporators as well as the newly appointed Ward Committee members.
About Janaagraha
Janaagraha is a non-profit trust, working towards the mission of transforming the quality of life in India’s cities and towns. Founded in 2001 by Ramesh Ramanathan and Swati Ramanathan, it started as a movement to include people’s participation in public governance and has now evolved into a robust institution for citizenship and democracy. The core idea of Janaagraha’s work does not revolve around fixing problems but instead seeking to fix the system that can solve the problems. To achieve this objective, Janaagraha works with citizens to catalyse active citizenship in city neighbourhoods and with governments to institute reforms to city governance (what we call “City-Systems”).
Janagraha believes that improved quality of life is directly linked to improved quality of infrastructure, services, and citizenship. Janaagraha hence works at intersections to fix the city systems across law, policy, institutions with a specific focus on sectors such as Climate Change, Gender Equality & Public Safety, Water and Sanitation, Education, and Public Health using tools and activities like Civic Participation, Municipal Finance, Advocacy and instilling 21st Century skills among youth to empower them to become active citizens. By strengthening urban capacities and resources, Janaagraha aims to achieve its mission of improving City Systems and Quality of life.
In January 2021, Janaagraha had organized participatory budgeting initiative MyCityMyBudget in Mangaluru. Over 1000 Mangaluru citizens submitted inputs how Mangaluru budget needs to be spent, which was later made into a report and submitted to the MCC.