NEW DELHI: Imagine the people of a major metropolitan city living in a condition where garbage is strewn along the roadside and there are landfill sites in the city which virtually resemble hillocks. Besides making the national capital of the country look downright shabby, the city’s citizens must contend with a spike in vector-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria every now and then.
To make the city look better and disease-free, there are three civic bodies in the city: the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), the Delhi Cantonment Board, and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD).
The jurisdiction of the first two is limited to Lutyens’ Delhi and Delhi cantonment respectively, leaving a lion’s share of the city’s colonies under the control of the MCD, which is, incidentally, now controlled by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)
The AAP, during its election campaign for the civic body in 2022, particularly made the pitch that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in its 15-year rule, has done very little to make Delhi look beautiful. In the run-up to the elections, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, in a tweet, said, “Do not vote for those who indulge in corruption, hooliganism and abuse. Do not vote for those who turned Delhi into garbage. Vote for those who will make Delhi neat, clean and shining.”
Apart from Kejriwal, the then deputy chief minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia also accused the BJP for not accomplishing much during its three-term rule in the MCD and appealed to the people of Delhi to vote for AAP in order to make the city clean and garbage-free.
After AAP won 134 wards out of 250, Kejriwal, also the party’s national convenor, posted on Twitter, “Thanks to the people of Delhi for this grand victory and many congratulations to all. Now all of us together have to make Delhi clean and beautiful”. He also told the winning councillors from AAP that they are no longer just a party member but they also belong to the ward and the corporation and have to work together, as issues like health and education are important in Delhi.
Moving forward, the AAP announced several initiatives like clearing all illegal garbage points in the city, holding campaigns against vector-borne diseases, fogging, sprinkling water to make dust particles settle down in order to combat air pollution, and expediting the work to remove landfills among others.
New cleanliness drive
With the purported aim to make Delhi clean and garbage-free, the MCD, in the month of August, launched a yearlong cleanliness drive ‘Ab Dilli Hogi Saaf’. As per the information received from the MCD office, 3,000 teams were formed for this, with each team being given the task to carry out an inspection in their designated areas and raise the issue on the MCD311 app, if they find streets with garbage.
In this regard, AAP MLA and MCD in-charge Durgesh Pathak said that the goal of the AAP-led body is to clean Delhi for which the Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Leader of the House in MCD and other concerned officials will visit 2-3 wards every day and will make sure that there is no garbage lying around in Delhi. Continuing with the trend, in the last week of September, Delhi Mayor Shelly Oberoi announced that, under the campaign of ‘Ab Dilli Hogi Saaf’, the MCD will remove all the 158 identified illegal garbage disposal points (GVPs), also termed as garbage vulnerable points, across the 12 zones by October 8. GVPs are points where garbage is regularly dumped and it gets accumulated over there.
MCD identified 37 GVPs in Rohini Zone, 22 in Civil Lines Zone, 15 in Shahdara South Zone, 13 in Karol Bagh, 11 in Central Zone and 10 each in Keshav Puram area, Shahdara North Zone, Najafgarh, Narela Zone, West Zone and South Zone. Currently, as per information received from MCD, the work to remove the GVPs is still in progress and it will take a few more weeks to clear it.
In order to prevent mosquito breeding in the city, the MCD carried out campaigns against vector-borne diseases like Dengue and Malaria. This was done with the help of RWAs and market associations. The MCD conducted inspections of the households and issued notices and penalties for the violation.
The civic body, under its comprehensive checking campaign, deployed Domestic Breeding Checker (DBC) workers and they conducted about 2.95 crore house visits and around 14 lakh houses were sprayed with insecticides and about 1.35 lakh legal notices were issued. Over 22,000 defaulters were fined and about seven lakh rupees were collected by the MCD. However, the weekly data on the vector-borne diseases in the city has not been released for weeks.
Despite carrying the campaigns and driving against the mosquito breedings in the national capital, it came into light when a response to a question by the leader of the house in MCD Mukesh Goel revealed that Delhi recorded over 3,000 dengue cases and one fatality this year. The MCD also said that during September, Delhi recorded 294 malaria cases and 23 Chikungunya cases, the maximum number of cases recorded in September in four years.
The city has three landfill sites: Bhalswa, Ghazipur and Okhla. According to the data, Delhi generates about 11,000 tonnes of solid waste every day and of which about 4,000 tonnes are dumped in the above landfills.
A few weeks back, Kejriwal visited Okhla landfill site and said that the work of waste disposal is running behind schedule as only 12 lakh tonnes of waste out of expected 18 lakh tonnes waste has been removed. He said the target is to remove 30 lakh tonnes by May 2024 by hiring additional agencies.
Obstacles in the way
To expedite the work of disposal of waste from the so called ‘garbage mountains’ of the city, the MCD, in the previous month said that the corporation body has started the tendering process to hire new agencies and deploy them on all the landfills. Two agencies will be working at each landfill site and each one of them will be processing approximately 30 lakh tonnes (LT) of garbage in a year. With the deployment of additional agencies at the three landfill sites, 90 LT of additional garbage is expected to be processed.
However, without the formation of a Standing Committee in the MCD house, the tendering process will face major issues as the projects above Rs 5 crore have to be passed by the said committee. The Supreme Court has reserved its order in the case for the formation of the Standing Committee.
In another development, MCD officials have said that the deadline to remove the three mountains of garbage has been extended to December 2024.Earlier, the deadline for Okhla landfill was by December 2023, Bhalswa was by March 2024 and Ghazipur by December 2024.
In the run-up to last month’s G20 Summit, the MCD deployed various techniques to make the city look clean and green. Among them, the initiative includes cleaning of prominent roads of the city like Mathura Road, Lodhi Road, Vasant Kunj Road, Abdul Ghaffar Khan Marg, Mahatma Gandhi Road, Dwarka Road, Nelson Mandela Marg and others.
In order to tackle the pollution during winters, the MCD has identified 13 pollution hotspots across the zones, which includes the area of Bawana, Okhla, Jahangir Puri, R K Puram, Dwarka, Narela, Punjabi Bagh, Mundka, Anand Vihar, Wazirpur, Rohini, Vivek Vihar and Mayapuri. As a part of the plan, the MCD said that it has also constituted a Dust Control and Management Cell (DCMC), consisting of all superintending engineers and horticulture directors.Also, under the Green Delhi Action Plan 2023-24 and to make Delhi a green city, the horticulture department of MCD has planted about 70,000 saplings and around two lakh shrubs.
To keep construction and demolition (C&D) waste under control, the civic body has recommended maximizing the use of mechanical road sweeping and water sprinkling.To act against open burning of garbage, a total of 383 monitoring teams of 932 officers and employees have been constituted by the MCD and they have been instructed to monitor and curb the activities of open burning and throwing of garbage.
The MCD has lauded the efficacy of its mobile application, ‘MCD 311’, which was launched last month, in order to empower citizens of the city to help in making the city clean by lodging complaints related to various civic problems. As per the Mayor’s office24,835 complaints were received on the app out of which 23, 498 have been resolved.
Politicians play blame game
While speaking to this newspaper, Deputy Mayor of Delhi Aaley Muhammad Iqbal said that all the cleanliness and pollution control drive in the city, pre and post G20 event, will continue and the effort is to fasten up the work.
The Deputy Mayor, who is also the councillor from Chandani Mahal ward of Central Delhi, further said that the tendering process, to hire additional agencies at the landfill site, will be cleared soon and the delay is due to the fact that the matter to form the Standing Committee is sub-judice.
“The BJP, in its 15-year-rule did nothing to clear the garbage points and landfills in the city. However, under the leadership of Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP and Mayor Shelly Oberoi, we will clean up and beautify the city in coming years”, the Deputy Mayor added.
Mukesh Goyal, the Leader of the House in MCD, expressing his concerns about the non-formation of the Standing Committee, said that his party is following up with the matter and they are trying to make sure that the cleanliness drive in the city prevails.
The Adarsh Nagar councillor, on queries about the weekly release of data on vector-borne diseases, said that instruction has been given to the concerned authorities to look into the matter and to release the data as soon as possible.
As per the sources in the MCD, in the coming days, a petition will be filed in the court requesting to pass orders to pave the way for the formation of the Standing Committee.However, the leaders of Opposition parties in the MCD have claimed that the condition of the city, in terms of cleanliness, has worsened since the AAP has come to power.
Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the house Raja Iqbal Singh has alleged that the AAP has neglected the garbage problem in the city since it came to power and has in fact created new garbage mounds in various locations across the city.
“Nothing is on ground and everything is on paper and in advertisements,” the councillor from Mukherjee Nagar area said.The LoP has further alleged that the AAP has deliberately spread those garbage mounds to disguise their height and make them look smaller.
The Deputy Leader of Opposition in MCD house Jai Bhagwan Yadav also refuted the AAP’s claim and said that, over the years, in his area, no new sanitation workers have been recruited and the people of his area are suffering as the population has increased and the workload of the workers has increased.
Terming the policies of AAP-led MCD towards the cleanliness of the city as a ‘Thermocol Model’, which stands nowhere, the leader of Congress in MCD Naziya Danish has alleged that the Mayor is focusing on the cleanliness drive only in those areas where AAP councillors are there while neglecting the other areas. She also raised the issue of forming a Ward Committee to look into the matters of the civic body.
Echoing Naziya, Ariba Khan, councillor from Abul Fazal Enclave, said that even after raising the concerns about shortage of sanitation staffs in her constituency during the MCD house session last month, she has not heard anything from the office of mayor about its redressal and thus the cleanliness drive in her area getting hampered.
She added that the contract of Dakshin Dilli Swachh Initiatives Limited (DDSIL), which collects and transports the municipal solid waste, will be over in October end this year and there is no future insight about who will take up the contract, as there is no Standing Committee.
As per the information received from the MCD office, the civic body is planning to extend the contract of the agency which collects garbage in the central zone for six more months, as the current contract will expire in November 2023.
December 2024
New deadline to remove three garbage mountains in the city
Pollution hotspots identified by MCD: 13
Bawana Okhla Jahangir Puri R K Puram Dwarka Narela Punjabi Bagh Mundka Anand Vihar Wazirpur Rohini Vivek Vihar MayapuriSpike in diseases
Delhi recorded over 3,000 dengue cases and one fatality this year despite campaigns by MCD. As per the civic body, during September, Delhi recorded 294 malaria cases and 23 Chikungunya cases, the maximum number of cases recorded in September in the last four years
Garbage vulnerable points (GVPs) identified by the MCD
37 in Rohini Zone 22 in Civil Lines Zone 15 in Shahdara South Zone 13 in Karol Bagh, 11 in Central Zone
