Local civic issues ignored due to delay in MCG polls

In absence of elected representatives in MCG, residents had to run from pillar to post for getting the bureaucrats to address civic issues

This year’s elections to the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG) gave residents a big reason to celebrate. They ended the year-long administrative and political impasse that was affecting people’s lives.

The MCG polls were held on September 24 this year after a delay of 15 months. (Parveen Kumar/HT File Photo)

In the absence of elected representatives in the MCG, residents had to run from pillar to post for getting the attention of the bureaucrats to address local civic issues, such as broken roads, clogged drains, illegal residential accommodations and waterlogged stretches. Besides these, new development projects, such as building community centers, public toilets, parks and erecting/fixing streetlights could also not be done in various wards.

The MCG polls were held on September 24 this year after 15 months. In the absence of councillors in the MCG from May 2016 to September 2017, the body undertook civic upkeep on a large scale, but ward-specific problems remained unaddressed.

Each councillor, during their tenure, gets a sum of ₹1 crore for executing local civic projects.

On its surface, the delay in elections was mostly administrative.

The polls were deferred because the state government had not started the delimitation process to redraw the civic wards. The wards had to be redrawn because of a clash between 2011 Census and 2011 MCG survey on city’s population, which was pegged at 9.9 lakh and 11.53 lakh, respectively.

However, politics also played a role in forcing residents to suffer.

Sources indicated that internal strife in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) cadres in the city, the sway the local MP has over councillors, all of whom came from Congress, and fear of losing the elections forced the ruling BJP to delay polls. The party was wary that an adverse result in the MCG polls would affect its performance in the Punjab assembly elections that were held in February 2017.

The in-fighting, that originated with which candidates would fight the 2017 elections on party tickets, not only affected BJP’s performance in the polls, where it won 14 seats out of 35, it also affected the mayoral elections.

The former cost the party an outright majority, like it had bragged, while the latter helped Congress-backed councillor Pramila Kablana bag the senior deputy mayor’s post.

Since their elections, however, residents have voiced their concerns over the mayors, who appear to be ‘seat fillers’ as their husbands, all of whom are senior political leaders in their respective parties, have been seen accompanying them for MCG meetings.

In the past Kablana’s husband and senior Congress leader Gaje Singh Kablana, and deputy mayor Sunita Yadav’s husband and BJP leader Anil Yadav were seen in MCG meetings.

“I voted for Sunita Yadav in the 2017 elections as she had been a councillor during the previous tenure and did satisfactory work for the ward. However, since the elections, she is accompanied by her husband to practically every function. It is vital that she takes independent decisions as a deputy mayor,” Brijesh Pal, a resident of Chakkarpur village, said.