Kolkata civic polls: Trinamool upbeat on prospects
18 April 2015 5:49 AM IST
With the Trinamool Congress (TMC) taking on its opponents in the civic polls in West Bengal, reports of sporadic clashes in some parts of Kolkata hit the headlines on Friday.
Polling for the 144-seat Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), which is at present ruled by theTMC,
will be held on Saturday and the results will be declared on April 28.
The remaining 93 municipalities will go to polls on April 25 and results will be announced on April 28.
A day ahead of the civic polls, two factions of the TMC clashed in Howrah and some vehicles parked in the vicinity were torched.
Mayor Sovan Chatterjee, also from TMC, however, said that he was confident of his party’s win by a large margin. “We will win over 70 per cent of the votes”, he told Millennium Post.
The party has fielded a number of young candidates this time, giving a tough competition to the opposition BJP, CPIM and Congress.
Just before the campaign closed on Thursday, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee took out a huge road
show in South Kolkata. She said that despite several constraints, the Trinamool government had performed well in the past four years. She added that Kolkata is the number one city in India, despite being a non-planned one.
“It is a wi-fi enabled city,” was one of the Trinamool’s campaign planks. Banerjee said in Delhi, citizens have to buy water whereas it is free in Kolkata. She added that power cuts, which was a big problem earlier, is now a thing of the past. The state is also increasing its power generation capacity, she said.
The civic polls being touted as crucial between the TMC and its opponents in the run-up to the Assembly polls in 2016.
waive loans to potato farmers: WB
The state government has urged the Centre to either waive or reduce loans taken by potato farmers from different banks, as they were forced to make distress sales of their produce because of bumper crops this year. “In a letter, we have urged the Centre to either waive or reduce loans taken by the potato farmers, as they are forced to make distress sales of their produce. We had written earlier too in this regard,” state Agriculture Minister Purnendu Bose said. The state had produced 1.15 crore tonnes of potato this year against the state’s demand of 55 to 60 lakh tonnes for consumption, Bose said.
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