Mir Nasir, the ruling Bangladeash Nationalist Party-backed four-party alliance candidate for mayor, has promised to turn Chittagong into a commercial capital and tourist city in the true sense.

He has also vowed to establish a "city government" for proper urbanisation of the city and ensuring civic amenities for the city dwellers.

Mir Nasir told the city dwellers during campaigns that if elected he will take up a comprehensive plan to free the city from traffic congestion and water logging. He will create a congenial atmosphere to help flourish the potential tourism and attract foreign investment.

Mir Nasir, also the state minister for civil aviation and tourism and the president of Chittagong city BNP, focused on two major problems, traffic congestion and water logging, in his electoral pledges.

He said he will set up separate bus and truck terminals to ease traffic jam in the city.

He committed to take steps for digging and re-excavations of silted canals, including Chaktai Khal (canal), to maintain the drainage system properly under special projects.

He said the "vision and mission" which he started during his last tenure as the mayor until 1994, will resume, if he is elected, for the overall development of the city.

The city corporation is a service oriented organisation whose job is to ensure health, education, power and water, he said.

But, the city dwellers are deprived of these civic amenities as CCC is now engaged in real estate business, raising market buildings on drains to create water logging and developing residential plots only to make money, he said.

The trend has to be changed, he says. “If I get elected, all the CCC activities will aim at serving the city dwellers,” he added.

"I like to work with transparency, accountability and honesty and I think my 30-month tenure as mayor is a testimony to this," he said.

He said that if elected he would not increase the holding tax and exempt thatched houses of such tax. At the same time CCC under him will lessen the tax load on the city dwellers, undertaking income-generating projects in phases.

Projects will be taken to rehabilitate hawkers in phases and they will get loans on easy conditions, he said.

He said rickshaw license fees will be decreased and the process of license issuing will be made easier as well as less time consuming, he added.

Mir Nasir assured the temporary workers and employees of CCC of confirming their jobs.

He said that the claim made by the present CCC of not increasing the holding tax in the last ten years was nothing but an act of "deceiving the city dwellers."

He said the present CCC misappropriated lakhs of taka by recruiting some 41 new assessors in all the wards.

The trade license fee has been increased to as high as Tk 25 thousand from Tk 500 while the CCC has emerged as bankrupt organisation, said Mir Nasir.

"Every staff, employee and contractor will make testimony to this bankruptcy and massive corruption has gripped the organisation," he added.