Issues of Central Delhi very different from rest of the national capital

New Delhi, May 11: It would not be wrong to say that national capital Delhi is mini India as people from all parts of the country reside here making it a truly cosmopilitan city. If Chitartanjan Park looks no different from a typical neighbourhood in Kolkata, Sunlight Colony in Maharani Bagh is like a part of Chennai, Tilak Nagar can be any small town in Punjab while Rajendra Nagar and Patel Nagar are colonies where refugees from the Partition settled down.

With such diversity in population, the expectation from the elections are also varied. The border areas like Narela, Bhawana, Badarpur etc want better roads and electricity, while the slums want regularisation and protection from eviction. Traffic and pollution remain common problems across the city, and some areas like Najafgarh, Bhawana, Burari, Mundka, and some areas bordering Uttar Pradesh have crime problems, and want better policing.

Now coming to Central Delhi, an elite area that has government offices, ministry offices, PMO, Parliament and Rashtrapati Bhawan, faces a differnt kind of problems. This area comes under NDMC and most residents of the area are government servants. Roads, law and order, electricity, water and civic amenities are not a problem here. Government clinics do a good job, cops come regularly for beat, roads are wide, there is lot of greenery and well connected with public transport.

The main reason why everything is good here is the fact that VIPs, Mps, ministers and top bureaucrats live in this area, including the Prime Minister and the President.

One of the main problems that residents of DIZ area or the Delhi interior Zone are frequent stopping of traffic due to VVIP movements. This areas gets locked down during the Republic Day.

Most houses in this area are government quarters and many were built long ago. The maintenance and upkeep of these quarters is the responsibility of the CPWD. A lot of people complain that CPWD does not pay the attension needed to complaints of clogged drains or electricity problems due to malfunctioning in the quarter's internal wiring.

Some of these quarters are of the British era and need a lot of maintenance. People say that CPWD engineers do not turn up even after many complaints. In some cases, the drains remain clogged for days before CPWD engineers are even able to figure out where the problem is.

"CPWD workers do a shoddy job. I used to live in Babar Place last year and once when the drain in our house got clogged, the CPWD personnel came after complaining five-six times," Saroja Vijaykumar, a high ranking government official who used to reside near Bengali Market, told OneIndia.

"These type -4 quarters were built way back in the 60s, so obviously the wiring is old and keeps getting short circuited. CPWD just does a surface repair work but does not find a long term solution to these problems. The work done by them is shoddy. They use sub-standard material. If they plaster a hole in the wall, it is likely to come off in 3-4 days," said Jag Jeevan Ram, a resident of Type-4 quarters in Babar Place.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won all seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi five years ago with a vote share of 46.40 per cent. A year later, when Delhi voted in the assembly election, voters shocked the BJP and decimated the Congress, which had formed three successive governments under Sheila Dikshit in the national capital from 1998 to 2013.

Delhi will vote for its seven Lok Sabha seats on Sunday in the ongoing parliamentary election. The poll campaign has ended with all three main political parties hoping to have sway over the national capital in the election.