Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Thursday sought Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention to end the governance impasse in the National Capital so that the Delhi government can address the issue of rising pollution in the city.
Mr Kejriwal, in a video message, said he had written to Mr Modi again, asking if he, despite being the Prime Minister, would be able to run his government if the bureaucracy didn’t adhere to his instructions of attending meetings.
Alleging that Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal is doing “nothing” to break the impasse despite repeated requests from the AAP, Kejriwal wrote that the Centre and the L-G have control over the IAS officers and had they been under the Delhi government, their “strike” would have ended within hours.
“We have spent four nights waiting at the LG’s [Lieutenant Governor] office but he hasn’t given us even four minutes of his time… hope the prime minister will pay some attention,” Mr Kejriwal tweeted on Friday morning.
Citing instances when the developmental projects in the city were allegedly stuck due to the bureaucratic crisis, Kejriwal wrote that the government has failed to address the issue of air pollution as the officers have not been attending meetings with ministers for the past three months.
In the video message, Mr Kejriwal said he had written to Mr Modi again and asked him what he would have done had he been in his shoes. “It’s been five days and instead of helping us ensure that the strike by IAS officers is brought to an end, you are standing by and letting even the Delhi Secretariat be taken over by leaders from your own party who have sat there in support of the bureaucracy’s strike,” he alleged.
This is at a time when the air quality levels in the city slipped to “severe” category in the last three days, with major monitoring stations reporting PM 10 and PM 2.5 as the primary pollutants. People have been advised to stay indoors after the toxic pollutants in the air were said to cause breathing difficulties.
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