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Transparent Administration: Village civic head distributes balance sheet to residents

In what could be a rarity in the history of panchayats, 32-year-old president of Karuppampulam panchayat, R Subbu Raman, adopted a novel method to demonstrate transparency in the activities of the civic body during the 75th Independence Day on Sunday. The idea he conceived and implemented was the circulation of the balance sheet of the panchayat to all the houses under his purview.

Transparent Administration: Village civic head distributes balance sheet to residents
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Thiruchirapalli

“The trigger behind this novel attempt was my conviction to help residents and the struggle that I went through to get details about the utilisation of public funds,” explains Raman, an MCA graduate. “I struggled to receive any detail from our panchayat. So, I had to depend only on RTI queries. My mission to help and work for the people of our village in getting government assistance began in 2012 soon after I completed MCA in Coimbatore. Being the only child, my parents did not want me to live outside the village and asked me to take up agriculture,” he recalled.



                                                Raman distributing balance sheet

Even as he was busy filing RTI applications, the idea of contesting and winning the local body polls dawned on him. This would help him reach out to the poor, he decided. He took the plunge in the civic polls held last year and Raman along with his friend M Vidhayanandam, a postgraduate in engineering won the election by a huge margin, who had been keeping the panchayat under their control for over three decades. Subsequently, he decided to make the people aware of the fund utilisation by the panchayat and printed the balance sheet of the panchayat accounts for a nine-month and began distributing it among the residents. “We wanted to distribute it to all the 1,680 families and it would be completed by Tuesday,” he added.

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