Kolkata: The West Bengal government is preparing a SoP to implement the ‘Amader Para Amader Samadhan’ program announced last week by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
These outreach camps will be set up from 2 August and run till 3 November with a 15-day break for Pujas.
The Samadhan camps will run from 9 am to 12.30 pm. These will be run on the same venues that run ‘Duare Sarkar’ camps in the afternoon.
The government estimates there would be 27,000 camps during the campaign period.
As per the SoP, a neutral community representative will be selected from each polling booth to engage with residents and identify local issues.
This representative will be a person without political affiliation. He/she will sign a document finalising the local issues that will emerge after discussions with the residents.
The SoP further elaborates that the representative should be someone amongst prominent local persons (non-politically), including retired teachers, government employees and SHG members who are acceptable to the camp attendees.
A state government employee will act as a facilitator and will also sign the document. This will be the only source for the government to learn about issues that citizens have flagged.
Once the venues for the camps are selected, the names will be listed on a dedicated website. The dates will be announced for each location.
Typically, this will involve local-level small issues that can be solved quickly. The bigger projects will continue separately.
The state has allocated Rs 8000 crore for the ‘Amader Para Amader Samadhan’ program. Each booth in the state will get Rs 10 lakh to fix its problems.
While the government has announced there will be one camp for three booths, the SoP allows some restructuring.
There could be one camp for one polling booth in far-flung areas. A city could have one camp for more than three booths.
There are over 80,000 polling booths in Bengal. Over 4700 of them are in Kolkata.
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