Orders on merger of Anakapalle & Bheemili municipalities with Visakhapatnam likely this weekend

By SNV Sudhir

Visakhapatnam, June 16, 2013: A decision regarding the merger of Anakapalle and Bheemili municipalities with Greater Visakhapatnam Municipality Corporation (GVMC) is likely to be out this weekend even while a notification calling for suggestions and objections on the proposal has been issued as a mere formality.

A government order (GO) is expected to be issued for the merger pushing aside all objections.

The GVMC received 3,000 letters welcoming the merger and 2,040 objections. Of these, there are eight major objections from civil society members like former bureaucrat E.A.S. Sarma, local MP and union minister of state for commerce and industry D. Purandeswari, MLAs from the Congress and the opposition parties.

The state government, on May 25, issued two GOs asking the GVMC to submit the suggestions and objections on the proposal within 15 days, leaving no time to register opinions of the public.
Purandeswari and other Congress MLAs like Tainala Vijaykumar raised objections saying that GVMC failed to provide basic amenities to areas on the outskirts of the city, which were merged in 2005. Merging more areas will only become a burden on the civic body, they felt.

But some others argued that money collected from city dwellers in the name of taxes was being used for developing areas already merged. “Around 70 per cent of the funds are being spent on the villages and the areas on the outskrits that were merged in 2005. It’s not true that there are no amenities provided in the areas. Funds for the city were not used as much for those villages,” GVMC commissioner M.V. Satyanarayana told this correspondent.

The proposal to merge the two municipalities with the GVMC had also turned the ruling Congress into a divided house in Visakhapatnam district. While a few Congress MLAs have openly objected to it, along with the opposition parties including the TD, CPI and CPM, MLAs who won on a PRP ticket in 2009, including ports and infrastructure minister Ganta Srinivasa Rao, are in support of the proposal.

When the merger proposal was initially mooted in 2009, it was opposed by several corporators and MLAs. However, since February last year, after the GVMC has come under special officer ruling, the authorities have been busy expediting the process.

Eying metro tag and more funds from the union government, the GVMC authorities brought the proposal to merge 140-year-old Anakapalle municipality  and Bheemili, the second oldest municipality. If they are merged, the GVMC would get more central funds.