The Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh will chair the 26th meeting of the Southern Zonal Council to be held in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh tomorrow. This is the first inter-state meeting to be held at the temporary capital Vijayawada.
The Southern Zonal Council comprises of the States of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala, Telangana and Puducherry. The Chief Ministers of all these states and senior officers from both Central and State Governments are expected to participate in this meeting. According to sources, so far there has been no confirmation from any of the chief ministers except chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu.
The Zonal Councils, created under the State Reorganization Act, 1956, are advisory bodies that discuss and advise the Central and State Governments on matters of common interest pertaining to a gamut of subjects, viz., infrastructures, health, security, social welfare, linguistic minorities, border disputes, etc., on the action to be taken in such matter. There are five Councils, one for each Zone viz., Eastern, Western, Northern, Southern, and Central. The secretarial functions of the Zonal Councils have been transferred to the Inter State Council Secretariat with effect from 1 April, 2011. The North-East Council set up under a separate Act of 1971 is under the administrative ambit of the Ministry of Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER).
The meeting of each Zonal Council needs to be held once in a year to iron out the differences between the governments on issues of development concerning regional interest and national programmes. However, meetings of most of the zonal councils were quite infrequent during the past.
Given the great potential of these institutions in resolving regional and interstate issues through their consultative mechanism, the present Government immediately after coming to power decided to revive and further strengthen these fora. Inter State Council Secretariat, which looks after the work of Zonal Council since 2011, was instructed to take on the preparatory work to complete meetings of all Zonal Councils, pending for years, by the end of 2015.
It was a challenging task as it mandatorily required holding of all the meetings of Standing Committees of these Zonal Councils prior to the Councils’ meetings. It called for immense coordination and networking to have all the states to meet on the table under the Chairmanship of Union Home Minister for each of these Zonal Councils.
State elections, natural calamities, law and order problems and such other pressing situations, more often than not, stymied the execution of this task but the government machinery rose to the occasion and pulled it off. With completion of this meeting of Southern Zonal Council which is last in the series of the Councils’ meetings this year, all the meetings of the Zonal Councils will be completed as committed by the Government.
The 8th meeting of the Standing Committee of the Southern Zonal Council was held at Hyderabad on 19th November, 2014 to scrutinize the agenda for deliberation and resolution for this meeting.
Issues of Inter-State and Centre-State cooperation and coordination have been flagged for this meeting, such as coastal security, peninsular region industrial corridor, introduction of peninsular tourism trains, finalization of inter-state reciprocal transport agreement, curbing the use of unacceptable levels of pesticides in fruits and vegetables, maintaining uniform standards of nursing courses, etc. Some other substantial issues of Centre State and Inter-State matters are also likely to be raised by Member States in the Council.
