AAP eyes UP civic polls, takes RTI route to corner BJP

WHILE IT is yet to take a call on contesting the 2017 Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has announced that it will contest the municipal elections in the state, also scheduled for next year.

Preparing for the polls to 14 municipal corporations in UP, AAP plans to target BJP, which has mayors in 10 of these municipal corporations and is also a dominant force in the civic bodies with large number of corporators from the party. The party has decided to raise the issue of alleged corruption in the municipal bodies.

AAP workers have already started filing Right to Information (RTI) applications seeking details of expenditure in each municipal ward for various sanitation, development and maintenance-related works in the last three years.

“The party has filed nearly 250 such RTI applications with Lucknow municipal corporation. We have received information about some wards in which corruption has been found. For example, in one case, fund has been spent for development of a road in ward a few months ago but that road does not exist at the site,” alleged Vaibhav Maheshwari, state AAP spokesperson.

Maheshwari said party workers are verifying the information being collected through RTI. “Information received through RTI will not be disclosed before polls. A compiled report for each municipal ward will be prepared with anomalies found. These reports will be presented before the public during canvassing for municipal polls,” said Maheshwari.

While Uttar Pradesh has 635 urban municipal bodies, including 197 Nagar Palika Parishad and 424 Nagar Panchayats, the Aam Aadmi Party has decided to focus on 14 big municipal corporations: Moradabad, Meerut, Ghaziabad, Saharanpur, Bareilly, Agra, Firozabad, Aligarh, Kanpur, Jhansi, Allahabad, Lucknow, Gorakhpur and Varanasi.