Five months on, Lok Adalat drags its feet

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Express news service

Posted online: Friday , January 04, 2008 at 12:00:00
Updated: Friday , January 04, 2008 at 02:41:18

Kolkata, January 3 The Lok Adalat cell of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) seems to have served no purpose. The cell was inaugurated on July 14 last year amid much fanfare with the aim of disposing of the cases between the civic body and the citizens.

Though five months old now, the adalat has still not finished hearing the applications filed in July. At the inauguration ceremony, Mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya had said: “Depending on the number of applications, we will decide on the number of adalats to be held per month.”

Though the adalat has more than a 1,000 pending applications, it still convenes once a month. Each session lasts around for three hours, which remain unattended by the mayor.

The Lok Adalat comprises four staff members of the law department (three of whom are newly employed).

“On an average, the total number of applications received by the Lok Adalat per day is nine. In a month, the cell receives about 270 applications,” said Subrata Chakraborty, KMC’s legal advisor.

The civic body has received about 1,440 applications till date while the total number of cases heard is 157.

The budget for a single Lok Adalat is Rs 10,000. At least, Rs 60,000 has been spent by the KMC in solving 53 cases by now.

Apart from this, the total number of applications pending with the Municipal Assessment Tribunal (MAT) is nearly 15,000. The cases are about valuation of property and other assessment-related problems.

Earlier, the Lok Adalat had refused to accept cases pending in MAT. But from December, the civic body has started accepting those too. “Till date, we have received 30 MAT cases,” said a Lok Adalat official.

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