14 Kempegowda awardees yet to collect cash award

After last years experience, Palike to select only 25 recipients

Rupees 20,000 is not too little to be ignored, especially when it comes with a ‘prestigious’ award. However, in the case of Kempegowda awards, the awardees appear to be reluctant to claim the award money, even though the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike is only too keen to dish out.

In April this year, the Palike gave away the Kempegowda awards amid much chaos and poor organisation. The Palike had initially planned to award 100 people, but the number increased to 125 owing to pressure from corporators. It did not stop here.

The number swelled to 155 on the previous day of the event and eventually 164 people were chosen for the award with some names being added till the last moment.

The then Mayor S K Nataraj proclaimed that it was a “historic event”.  And rightly so. The number of recipients on the dais looked almost equal to the number of people off it.
Fourteen people among the 164 awardees are yet to claim their cheques for the cash award.

“We have been contacting them but they are not responding. We called the phone numbers they had given us. But, the numbers either do not exist or there is no response.

We wrote letters to the residential addresses given by these 14 people but there is no reply,” said a Palike officer. The 14 people who did not come forward claiming the cheques are: Chitra, Auto Raja, Shankare Gowda, Anjaneyulu, S Chinnaswamy Raju, R Guru Rao, Dr B C Bhagwan, Shankar Narayan, Dr M S Nagaraju, Prof H K Ambika, Venugopala Narayanaswamy, Narayana Gowda, V Ramakrishna and Dr V S Puttaswamy Gowda.

Now, the Palike authorities have decided to send all the cheques to its finance department with a note to cancel them and use the amount for other purposes.

Once bitten, twice shy
Learning from last year’s fiasco, the Palike has decided to restrict the number of awardees to only 25 this year.

Nanjundappa, floor leader in the Council, told Deccan Herald that he would ensure that the number of awardees does not exceed 25 this year under any circumstances.