Mohali, July 4 -- Bureaucratic inertia is coming in the way of Chandigarh's development and public welfare, said member of Parliament (MP) Manish Tewari on Thursday, while strongly advocating a reset of the Union territory's governance model. During an interaction with Hindustan Times on his one year in the Lok Sabha, Tewari blamed a bloated bureaucracy, and a friction between the administration and a financially-stressed municipal corporation for the lack of an effective and efficient governance in the country's first planned city. The three-time Congress MP, who has previously represented Ludhiana and Anandpur Sahib constituencies, sharply criticised the burgeoning bureaucracy in Chandigarh, remarking, "You don't require such a huge paraphernalia to run a 10 by 10 km city. That is the fundamental design flaw. Chandigarh has become a bureaucratic parking ground." In support of his argument, he pointed to the bureaucratic set-up in the neighbouring districts of Mohali and Panchkula, both bigger in size and population as compared to Chandigarh. "If Mohali and Panchkula can be run by one deputy commissioner and one senior superintendent of police each, why does Chandigarh require such a huge bureaucratic paraphernalia?" he questioned. "It is because of this bureaucratic overload that nothing moves in Chandigarh," said the former Union minister in his sharpest public criticism yet of the UT administration. Home to a 15 lakh strong population and spread over 114 square kilometres, Chandigarh currently has 12 IAS officers, seven Punjab Civil Services (PCS) officers, five Haryana Civil Services (HCS) officers and four officers from central cadre. Plus, the UT has eight Indian Police (IPS ) officers and three Indian Forest Service (IFS) officers. Asked whether he, as a Congress parliamentarian, was facing challenges in resolving the legacy issues of Chandigarh, which is administered by the BJP-ruled federal government, Tewari emphatically said he had no problem at the central level. "At the local level, yes.there is politics, but there is no institutional attempt to undercut me," he said, adding, "The challenge of surmounting that bureaucratic inertia is enough of a subversion." Tewari lamented that the difficulty with the bureaucracy was that they were happy with the "status quo". "So, it's like getting up every morning and pushing against a wall. And, you have to be the woodpecker on a daily basis...That is the only way to get stuff done and it always gets done incrementally," he said. >>Full interview on P2...