Fazilka: The high profile Deputy Commissioner, Isha Kalia has captured many tags in the recent past, such as, Udaan girl, Sanitation champion, due to her hard working frame of mind in the last two years. After taking over as Deputy Commissioner of Fazilka, Isha Kalia took several steps to provide fair and transparent administration, formulated beautification plan for public places and also outlined an agenda to accelerate the development works. She is famous for doing things in her own way.
Babushahi.com tracked her activities and spent a day with her in the district administrative complex on Wednesday in August.
True to her style, after joining at Fazilka, Isha Kalia created history by starting construction of 967 latrines in a single day in the whole district. This endeavour was named as “Mission 1000”. This first of its kind massive action of district administration was designed by Isha Kalia with an aim to give an impetus to the swachh bharat mission. The action got positive reception from the state administration. Later on many other districts followed this model.
To mitigate the problems and to solve the grievances of the people, Isha Kalia has decided to dedicate the first day of the each month to redress the grievances in a special open public grievance redress camp, which is held in the DAC. Besides this, she is open to public meets whole day, without any fixed meeting hours. People flock at her office; she gave an audience to more than 500 people in her office on Wednesday. “It is regular feature” says one of her subordinate officials. It denotes people’s reliance on her.
To speed up the development works and to keep on regular monitoring of the projects, Isha Kalia introduced a new monitoring mechanism, named as “Field Friday” (FFD). It mandates that every Friday of the week, teams of administration including her (Isha) will fan out in the field to check out the ongoing developments works in the rural & urban areas, besides interacting with people to get feedback. FFD has proved very successful as the unreasonable delay in the works has been cut down.
How did you conceive the idea of massive action named “Mission 1000”? Asked babushahi.com
Isha Kalia said “I wanted to send a strong message across that this is an important task and we need to get serious. So to give a mass effect, we wanted to celebrate mission 1000”. It breeds a sense of collective responsibility added Isha.
Isha Kalia further disclosed “We have formulated a plan to beautify the public places in the city. We are focussing on aesthetics. Fly over and school buildings have been chosen for this purpose”. NGOs have been involved in this task. We are also revamping the anganwadi buildings said Isha.
We are organising health camps in the slum areas especially for the women and children disclosed Isha Kalia.
Answering a query, Isha said “My top priority is to provide transparent and accountable administration to the people along with maximum monitoring of the development projects”. We want to finish all the works in a stipulated period added Isha Kalia.
DC Isha Kalia is ushering a new era based on transparency and driven by a desire to foster real and lasting perfection for the people in the district.
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