At odds with mayor, BJP corporators asked to raise budget concerns on March 18

All’s not fine between BJP corporators and city mayor Sushma Kharkwal. The rift was pretty evident when several corporators, mostly from the ruling party, boycotted Monday’s executive committee meeting that was to discuss Lucknow Municipal Corporation’s proposed ₹4,236 crore budget for 2025-26.

The meeting was deferred till March 18 due to a lack of quorum. Ten of the 12 members were absent. Out of the 10, eight are from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and two from the Samajwadi Party (SP).

All the eight BJP corporators have been asked by the party’s district unit to attend the executive meeting now scheduled for March 18, and to raise their concerns regarding the budget directly with officials. They recently met BJP district president Anand Dwivedi to inform him about their differences with the mayor.

The district leadership has also urged the mayor to accommodate the demands of the corporators.

Mukesh Singh Monty, one of the protesting corporators, said, “We had requested for a discussion on raising the budget to address the specific developmental needs of some wards.” However, he alleged, the mayor dismissed their concerns outright. This led the corporators to boycott the meeting, claiming that their voices were being ignored in the decision-making process.

Monty, meanwhile, has resigned from the executive committee.

One of the issues raised by the corporators was the allocations to sanitation. The budget for sanitation was raised to ₹800 crore, which the corporators said disproportionately benefited private companies handling sanitation contracts. They expressed concerns that such a large budget increase was not in line with the needs of the city and was instead aimed at benefiting certain contractors, rather than addressing core issues.

Other corporators who met the BJP district president include Anurag Mishra, Bhirgunath Gupta, Anoop Kamal Saxena, K.N. Singh, Umesh Sanwal, Charanjit Singh Gandhi, and Gauri Sawariya. They said on Sunday, they had gathered at the mayor’s camp office for a budget meeting, during which they made a formal request to increase the budget estimates. The mayor, meanwhile, dismissed the allegations, stating that the corporators were primarily upset because she had refused to increase their individual development quotas. She mentioned that they had requested an increase from ₹1.5 crore to ₹3 crore per corporator. According to the ,ayor, the development budget in various wards had already exceeded ₹5 crore, with funds coming from several sources, including the revolving fund and the 15th Finance Commission.

Kharkwal further alleged that some of the development projects were only on paper or were re-done unnecessarily, simply to ensure the corporators could use their allocated funds.

She added that she had not yet met any senior party members to address what she described as the corporators’ indiscipline. However, she made it clear that if the corporators continued to skip executive committee meetings, she would submit a report to higher authorities.

BJP district president Anand Dwivedi, meanwhile, acknowledged receiving a letter regarding the issue from the corporators and stated that he would arrange a meeting between them and the mayor after Holi.

Municipal commissioner Inderjit Singh, however, assured that the functioning of the corporation would not be affected by the boycott. He said that, according to the rules, the second meeting of the executive committee would not require a quorum, meaning the budget would be passed regardless of the number of members present.