Jorhat, Aug. 25: Jorhat is turning towards the Prime Minister's Office to get personal, social or economic work done.
For years Ankur Gupta, BJP commissioner of ward 6 under Jorhat Municipal Board, has been trying to get births and deaths registered online in the state, it has now come to fruition.
Prashanta Kumar Bordoloi, head of the department civil engineering department of Kaziranga University, moved the PMO against the National Highway of India Development Corporation Limited's lackadaisical attitude towards a lack of drainage system, which was destroying tea and paddy farms on either side of the under-construction four lane highway.
Pradeep Kumar Patni Jain, a small savings postal agent, dashed off two letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi complaining about the inordinate delay in receiving passport for his minor daughter and about his apprehensions that postal agents would be dispensed with following the conversion of post offices into post banks.
In response to the first letter he got the passport within 10 days from the passport office at Guwahati and in second case, he received a letter forwarded by the finance ministry, which stated that for the time being there were no such proposals.
Jorhat Municipal Board ward commission Gupta had handed over a memorandum on various issues, including the tedious process of getting births and deaths certificates, to the Prime minister during his visit to Jorhat in March.
"The action taken was quick. The Union ministry of housing and urban poverty alleviation on the PMO's reference wrote a letter to the joint secretary to the government of Assam, urban development department regarding a representation received from me in this regard on April 18," he said.
On August 5, that the chairperson of Jorhat Municiapl Board received a letter that from joint director health services, Jorhat, that the director health services, Assam, would conduct a training on CRS software for online registration of births and deaths at the urban health centre in Jorhat district.
Therefore, infrastructure facilities like computer, printer with Internet connectivity should be made available.
"The process has started and hope that it will be implemented soon all over the state," Gupta said.
Bordoloi's letter to the Prime Minister stated: The four-laning of NH 37 is going on from Nagaon to Upper Assam districts, which is passing through the tea and rice bowl of Assam. Sir, Assam tea and paddy are raised side-by-side on the flat alluvial terrain of the Brahmaputra of which tea is a dry foot crop. The precondition of raising tea is the land should have water table below the root zone of the crop, which is 1.0m. To lower the water table, tea estates install a drainage system, of which main drain is minimum 1.5m deep. In the four-laning project, the National Highway Authority is placing culverts just at the land bed level, which needs lowering by another 1.0m to alleviate drainage congestion through rectification of the culvert placing across the four-lane highway under construction. Otherwise, high bed level of the culverts will invite doom for the tea industry."
"As soon as they received the letter, I got a visit from an National Highway of India Development Corporation Limited engineer and we found a solution in which the corporation has agreed to make drains on either side, which would flow into nearby rivers or rivulets. Earlier I had written an article on this, approached our MPs but nobody bothered. I am happy that the PMO is taking such a serious note of the people's complaints at the ground level," he said.
Jain said he had applied for the passport for his daughter Ridhi at a camp in Jorhat.
"For more than seven months my status on the passport office website acknowledged that the documents had been received. I sent several emails to them but there was no response. I sent a letter to the Prime Minister by speed post and in two days time I got a call from the passport office and the process was initiated for my daughter. Within 10 days I received the passport," he said.
