AAP senior leader and MCD In-charge Durgesh Pathak stated – monsoon showers are on the verge of hitting Delhi and 95 per cent drains come under BJP-ruled MCD’s purview but they haven’t even started cleaning them yet.
New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Sunday accused the municipal Corporations of Delhi is ‘failing’ to clean drainage before monsoon. AAP leader and MCD in-charge Durgesh Pathak said that the city is facing the threat of unprecedented waterlogging yet again as BJP-ruled MCD has yet to make preparations to de-silt drains in time.
AAP senior leader and MCD In-charge Durgesh Pathak stated – monsoon showers are on the verge of hitting Delhi and 95 per cent drains come under BJP-ruled MCD’s purview but they haven’t even started cleaning them yet.
“The BJP talks of bulldozers all day but where are the bulldozers that should be cleaning drains? There’s such a huge shortage of bulldozers that MCD has had to rent out bulldozers to clean drains. By this time, a fleet of bulldozers should have been deployed to clean the drains. The BJP-ruled MCD must get all drains smaller than 60-ft cleaned and desilted immediately,” he said.
Pathak said, “Meteorologists claim that the monsoon season in Delhi will begin any time after 5th June, which is a couple of weeks from today. Over the past 15 years, we have all seen how flooded the entire state of Delhi gets during monsoons due to waterlogging. Photographs and visuals depicting the waterlogging situation with entire buses submerging in water are often circulated in the media and on the internet during this time of the year. In fact, we even lost a precious life to the unrelenting rains and poor water logging system last year.”
He continued, “It is 22nd May today, and there isn’t much time left before 5th June floats by, and the monsoons are upon us. Despite a mere 10-15 days remaining, the BJP-ruled MCD has not yet begun the process of cleaning the silt out of drains measuring 60 foot or less, which cover 95 per cent of Delhi’s drainage system. It is important to bring this dismal state of affairs to public notice, of how the BJP-led MCD is failing to fulfil its basic responsibilities. If due process had been followed, the process of cleaning out these drains, which come under the BJP-led MCD, should have been completed by now. But it is appalling to note that the work has not even been started.”
Rejecting the allegations made by the AAP leader, MCD said that the civic agency has been working on war footing to meet the target of cleaning all the drains under its jurisdiction before the onset of monsoon. The Corporation has chalked out a plan to complete the work of desilting of all the drains it its jurisdiction before June 15. It said that the municipal body has adequate numbers of equipment/machinery for taking out silt from the drains and well trained personnel to carry out the work in a prescribed manner. Owing to this, the Corporation is all set to complete the work in a proper way within the fixed timeline.
Amit Kumar, Director P&I, said that the Civic Agency has so far removed about 60000 metric tonnes of silt from various drains, completing about 66 per cent of the total target and remaining work will be completed by June 15. He said that the silt taken out from the drains is being sent to the landfill site and its monitoring is being done through RFID tags. The entire process is fully computerized and there is no manual interference.
