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Modi's plan of developing 100 smart cities for Rs 70 crore each is a joke, Prithviraj Chavan says

MUMBAI: Chief minister Prithviraj Chavan has said the senior bureaucrats in the state are not trained to rule Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai and they were turning them into “wild west”. He said there is a huge manpower deficit to administer urban areas.“My biggest challenge is administering newly urbanized areas and already urbanized areas. All the IAS manpower is oriented to rural administration—revenue collection etc. I am making sure that collectors serve one term in urban areas to start understanding the sector,” Chavan told TOI in an interview.He said the collectors would be posted to urban areas early in their career so that they understand the complexities of the administration.Chavan said the difficulty in tackling illegal constriction in urban areas was direct fallout of the absence of able administrators. He said there was tremendous pressure to legalize all illegal constructions. “I said that’s not on. If you legalize, it will get legalized throughout the state.”He pointed towards the committee that was appointed to study illegal constructions in rural areas and said the panel suddenly decided to apply it to urban areas without a thorough study being done on urban illegal constructions.“There was not a single municipal commissioner on the committee… only divisional commissioners since it was to study rural areas. I stopped it… resisted huge pressure including MLAs threatening to resign. I finally appointed a committee under BMC commissioner Sitaram Kunte to study illegal constructions in urban areas,” he said.( Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan)“We cannot turn a blind eye or let things be. It will be too dangerous. We have to do some kind of no-construction on DP road, open spaces etc. If it is an owned plot and the building is structurally stable, we can condone some things,” he said.Chavan said the new committee headed by Kunte has at least 15 municipal commissioners on it and they would bring the problems of their cities and suggest solutions to improve it. But he reiterated that it would only solve part of the problem, as the main issue was lack of trained administrators.