City South Begins 76-Day Ward Drive for Complaints,

A 76-day ward-by-ward outreach campaign has begun in Varanasi’s City South constituency, promising residents a daily forum for civic complaints alongside sanitation work, plantation and door-to-door contact. The programme, launched from Suryakund ward, is scheduled to continue until October 2.

Urban development and energy minister AK Sharma opened the drive with City South MLA Neelkanth Tiwari and former Amraiwadi MLA Jagdish Patel. The plan is for a full day to be spent in one ward at a time, with public representatives and workers hearing complaints, inspecting local conditions and following up with municipal, Jal Kal and electricity officials.

Residents in Suryakund raised an unpolished list of everyday failures: tangled overhead electricity wires, heaps of construction debris, damaged sewer chambers, clogged drains, potholes and broken paving stones. These are not issues that require another city master plan. They require named officers, repair dates and a way for residents to see whether a direction was completed.

The launch also included planting at Sanatan Dharm Inter College. Five saplings are proposed in each ward. The number is achievable, but survival matters more than a ceremonial count. Each planting should have a species suited to the site, a guard where necessary and a person or institution responsible for watering after the political convoy leaves.

Sharma described the campaign as a model for direct engagement and linked cleanliness with the public movements associated with Mahatma Gandhi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tiwari said complaints of every size would receive priority. The promise will be credible only if residents can distinguish between an issue recorded, an issue assigned and an issue resolved.

Political outreach and public service are mixed openly in the programme, which also includes interaction with welfare beneficiaries and communication about government achievements. That is legitimate political activity, but civic help should not depend on party affiliation. Every resident in a ward must be able to raise a complaint without being asked to participate in promotion.

A simple public tracker could transform the campaign. For each ward, it could list the date visited, complaints received, responsible department, deadline and status. Photographs are useful for severe defects, but they should not replace work orders, measurements and completion notes.

The 76-day format also allows patterns to emerge. Repeated sewer overflow may point to a network fault rather than poor sweeping. Broken paving after utility work may require coordination clauses in contracts. A ward visit should therefore feed citywide management, not remain an isolated grievance camp.

Residents will judge the drive on what they can touch: a drain that flows, a safe chamber cover, a cleared lane and a tree still alive in summer. If the programme reaches October 2 with a verifiable record of those outcomes, it can justify its length. If it produces only 76 sets of photographs, City South will still be waiting for the ordinary repairs described on day one.