Buck must stop at Kejriwal's door

Barely days after biker Praveen Kumar lost his life after getting stuck in a pothole in south Delhi’s Vasant Kunj, a young family of three perished in a house collapse at Mohan Garden in west Delhi. These horrible incidents took place as the state city is grappling with water logging caused by active monsoon even as the neighbouring Gurgaon is reaping the consequences of poor infrastructure and governance deficit in a suburb with skyscrapers housing at least half of the Fortune 500 companies. While Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is away soothing himself at a 10-day Vipasana in Dhraramshala, his Haryana counterpart Manohar Lal Khattar took an aerial route to survey  water logging in Gurgaon. We have seen ministers and chief ministers doing chopper rides for flood hit areas; Khattar chose to do an aerial survey of traffic and water logging! 

The Vasant Kunj incident and several other such mishaps which go unreported in the media are nothing but the criminal negligence on the part of the administration which has failed to give safe roads to citizens. Whatever the claims and counter-claims about the jurisdictional issues, the buck for such incidents must stop at the door of the Delhi chief minister. But let those like the Congress leaders including Ajay Maken not forget that incidents like the one at Mohan Garden are nothing but result of an unplanned, unauthorised and irregular development of the capital city. By any reckoning, more than half the population of the city lives in pathetic slum-like conditions created by such kind of development, courtesy the Congress which ruled Delhi mostly. Houses in Mohan Garden are submerged in water as the low lying colony becomes catchment for the surrounding neighbourhood. It is a typical structural problem of lopsided development, accountability for which should be fixed on the previous governments.

But that does not mean that the Aam Aadmi Party government can only indulge in blaming others every time there are mishaps and security lapses resulting in loss of lives. Even if the previous governments have to be blamed for the lopsided development of the city, the govern-ment of the day cannot afford to be helpless. Much before the late arrival of monsoon, the weather office has been giving forecasts of above-normal rains this year. Those forecasts should have been taken seriously by the state government to keep its apparatus ready to meet eventualities of flooding, water logging or the consequential issues like spread of dengue. Unfortunately, the indifference of the government machinery persists in Delhi as is the case in Mumbai or Bengaluru.