Ahead of civic elections, a Mumbai-based citizen’s group has designed a unique mobile application through which residents can request personalized report cards of performance of corporators from their respective areas.
Nagarikayan Research Center, a citizen’s representative forum, has designed the ‘My Corporator’ (Majha Corporator) app, which is available in Google playstore, through which a citizen living in any municipal ward can request for a report card of their corporators.
After a citizen flags a request, members of this organization bring out information from the civic body by filing RTIs and other documents, following which a report is prepared.
Anand Bhandare, coordinator from Nagarikayan, said there are five parameters based on which the corporators are marked. These are: attendance in various civic committees and meetings, number of questions asked, number of motions filed, amount of funds used and how they are used.
“This report card is prepared only after we receive a request from citizens. After we receive the request, we access the attendance logs and scrutinize the purchase document orders that reflect the expenses incurred by the corporators,” Bhandare said.
“Our volunteers also carry out a ground-level social inspection to check the quality of raw materials used for projects like road to check if the same work is being implemented in a particular area,” he said.
So far, 56 report cards of 44 corporators have been uploaded on the app. Some of these corporators include Pratima Khopade, Sunil Prabhu and Geeta Singhan from the Shiv Sena, Kamlesh Yadav, Prakash Gangadhare and Neil Somaiya from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Vinnie D’souza, Sonam Jamsutkar and Sneha Jagade from the Congress.
Bhandare said that besides marking corporators, the application also evaluates independent experts that are inducted on various civic development committees.
“Based on the parameters, we evaluate the performance of the corporators and have specific color markings to assess their performance. If the average marking or percentage is below 40, then it is highlighted with gray color, if the percentage ranges between 40 and 70, it is highlighted with blue color, and above 70 is marked with green color,” Bhandare said.
Congress corporator, Jagdish Amin, BJP’s Geeta Kiran Bhandari and Sena’s Sandhya Doshi are some of the highest performers with scores above 70. On the other hand, Sena’s Dilip Lande and BJP’s Anita Panchal and Parag Shah are among the low performers.
RTI activist Anil Galgali said it is time the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) comes up with such mobile application on its own to disseminate information about fund allocation and usage.
“Usage of mobile application is the way forward. In this app, we are trying to track the actual money spent by the BMC during and after the pandemic which will give us the real on-ground scenario in Mumbai,” Galgali said.
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