NGO survey ranks north corp as best civic body in capital

NEW DELHI: Councillors of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation have raised the maximum number of issues as compared to the other two civic corporations — south and east — in the city, even as their questions were found to be the least relevant to civic concerns, a report released by the Praja Foundation on Thursday said.

Of the three municipal bodies, North corporation was ranked the best with a score of 62.3%, South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC) second at 61.4% and East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) last at 60.9%.

Of the 8,277 issues raised by the North corporation councillors in the House, only 2,955 were found to be related to citizens’ complaints.

Nitai Mehta, managing trus- tee at Praja Foundation, said, “These figures show how aware, approachable and serious our local representatives are about the issues related to citizens in their wards. During the survey, we even interacted with citizens who don’t know the name of their councillors or have never seen them in the area.”

In comparison to North, 6,696 issues were raised by the councillors of the SDMC between April 2017 and March 2018. Of these, 2,518 were found to be related to residents’ problems.

The situation, however, seemed better in the EDMC where councillors raised 3,155 complaints and 1,272 were directly related to the problem faced by residents in their wards.

Of the total 272 councillors in the capital, only two have been rewarded with an A grade in the performance ratings and 57 councillors have been graded B (70% to 80%). The rest have been graded C (70% and lesser) .

Councillors have been graded on their attendance, the number of issues raised, criminal record and perceived performance. The information was based on Right to Information (RTI) queries filed and the ground survey done by the NGO.

The top three councillors are Abhishek Dutt, from Andrews Ganj who scored 80.51% , Sanjay Goyal from Vivek Vihar, who scored 80.37%, and Inderjeet Sehrawat, from South Delhi’s Mahipalpur, who got 78.89%.

Those at the bottom are Babina Shokeen from Nilothi with a performance score of 28.24%, Parveen from Mustafabad with 30.2% and Shakila Begum from Seelampur with 40.8%. While the overall average score of male councillors is 63.4% , the average score of women councillors is 60%.