AAP leader and Water Minister Atishi responded to LG VK Saxena and said that his letter might have been intended for optics but one cannot refute the fact that water woes in Delhi have been artificially created.
Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena, in a scathing letter to jailed Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, accused the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of using the death of a woman for political gains. The crux of the letter was the mismanagement at the Delhi Jal Board that resulted in the said water woes in the city. AAP leader and Water Minister Atishi responded to Saxena and said that his letter might have been intended for optics but one cannot refute the fact that water woes in Delhi have been artificially created.
In the letter to Kejriwal, LG Saxena said that the water minister using the death of a woman in a fight over fetching water was for “narrow political goals” and that the government has created a “chimera of free water”. His letter comes two days after Atishi had written to the LG, asking him to suspend the CEO of Delhi Jal Board after the woman’s death in Farsh Bazar.
“I was deeply distressed at the insensitive communication from the Minister for Water… Atishi on Sunday. While I was yet to receive the letter, it characteristically found its way on various social and mainstream media platforms, the moment it was signed. She has chosen to use the unfortunate death of a woman in East Delhi for narrow and partisan political goals,” he said in his letter, adding that the water minister indicted her own government of 9 years by underscoring the inadequacy of water supply. The LG said that the woman’s death was not the only of such cases, and that many such incidents have happened in the past due to the failure of the government.
“Such instances have become a recurrent phenomenon year after year and have been widely reported in media over the last 10 years… Water woes in the capital, especially in settlements where the poor live, have exacerbated over the last decade…Your minister’s hasty missive to me is an admission of these failures and defaults of performance of your government and amount to facile attempts at shrugging responsibility off, a complex problem,” he added.
Saxena, quoting the Economic Survey 2023-24, tabled in the recent Budget Session of the Delhi Assembly, said that water treatment capacity only grew marginally from 906 MGD to 946 MGD in the last decade. This is growth of 4.4 per cent, while the population of the city grew 15 per cent. There is an overall shortfall of 290 MGD of water supply in Delhi, he said.