Delhi: Next MCD meet on Saturday, nine items on agenda

The house meeting of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) will be held on Saturday at 2pm at the Civic Centre, officials said on Friday.
This comes a week after an eight-hour-long ruckus during the previous meeting when the last member of the standing committee was elected, due to which nine agenda items could not be discussed that will now be taken up during the meeting on Saturday.
“A note regarding the election outcome being subjudice will be sent to the mayor by late Friday. Meanwhile, those agenda items will be taken up that could not be addressed during the last house meeting,” said an MCD official.
One of the agenda items is the renewal of MCD’s MoU with Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group that consults on sanitation issues with the civic body, allotting MCD land to the Delhi Metro near Prashant Vihar Metro station, purchase of larvicide for vector-borne disease control and deciding a date for constitution of the standing committee of MCD.
The mayor had earlier adjourned the session midway on September 26 and fixed October 5 for the next meeting that would also include the election of the last member of the standing committee. However, the lieutenant governor intervened, asking that the elections be conducted the same day. While the elections took place, only Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) members participated in it while AAP members walked out. During the election, BJP member Sunder Singh was elected as the last member of the standing committee with 115 votes. Following the tussle mayor Shelly Oberoi filed a petition in court challenging the election.
Control over the standing committee, a key panel which controls MCD’s purse strings, has been at the centre of a political and legal tussle between the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for at least 20 months. Of the 18 standing committee members, 12 are elected through zonal wards committees and six are directly elected by the house of councillors. Currently, the BJP has 10 members in the standing committee, and the AAP eight.
The 18th seat was vacated when the BJP councillor from Dwarka-B, Kamaljeet Sehrawat, resigned upon being elected the party’s parliamentarian from West Delhi constituency. To be sure, the municipal secretariat is responsible for coordinating the security detail and facilitating the conduct of the House meetings.
Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva on Friday said that in the last two years, AAP has completely stalled the working of MCD. “The situation has become so bad that fearing defeat, the AAP is not even allowing the election for the constitutionally required Dalit mayor as per the Municipal Corporation Act. MCD is neither fulfilling its service responsibilities nor completing any administrative work. Since 2015, AAP’s Delhi government has financially crippled MCD to sabotage the BJP administration, and since coming to power in 2022, they have turned the corporation into a political and legal battleground,” said Sachdeva.