SDMC councillors to pay official phone bills from their own pockets

NEW DELHI: Beginning March 1, South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) councillors will have to pay official phone bills from their own pockets .

A proposal to this effect was passed in the standing committee on Thursday, stating that the corporation will not pay the councillors’ phone bills from March 1 any longer.

“The decision was taken with a consensus. In fact, a majority of BJP and Congress councillors agreed to keep the numbers with them as they would continue to be in touch with their electorates,” said Shailender Singh, standing committee chairman, SDMC. The phone numbers were issued to the councillors after the 2012 elections.

The purpose was to make it easy for the residents to remember their wards. “These are usually pre-paid numbers and their bills are paid by the civic body up to certain limit,” said a senior official.

The corporation has also started calculating the ‘depreciating value’ of other facilities provided to councillors such as laptops and i-pads till March. At least three recently published scientific studies have highlighted once again, the presence of a cocktail of disease causing, drug-resistant pathogens on currency notes and warned of their potential to transmit a number of diseases in the community, including urinary and respiratory tract infections, septicaemia, skin infections, recurrent meningitis, toxic shock syndrome and a variety of gastro-intestinal diseases. In fact, the scientific journals have been publishing these alarming facts almost every year, but neither the health nor the food sector has taken cognizance of this serious public health issue.

A report published in the Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences in 2016, for example, says that 86.4 per cent of the 120 currency notes tested at the department of microbiology, Tirunelveli Medical College, Tamil Nadu, were contaminated