Doon-based students activist group, Making A Difference By Being The Difference (MAD) has demanded that the report prepared by the committee led by Rajpur Road MlA Rajkumar on the regularisation of slums of Uttarakhand should be made public and open to public scrutiny before any decision is taken by the state government on its implementation.
Addressing the media here on Monday, group leader Abhijay Negi cited the response to their RTI application dated October 26 2015 by the State’s Urban Development department wherein the department had completely denied that they had received any such report prepared by the Rajkumar Committee. “A few months down the line, for the same department to say that the slums will be regularised on the basis of that report - raise question mark on their actions because they had initially denied having received any such report and even if the report was received by them at a later date, why is it that the state urban development ministry does not independently asses the findings of such reports.”
MAD members also said that the mandate of the Rajkumar committee initially was also to explore the prospects of rehabilitation of those slums which have come up right at the river beds of the streams such as Rispana, Bindal, Tamsa and Suswa. However, the focus of the committee has exclusively been on regularising encroachment rather than exploring avenues of rehabilitation - which was also one of the mandates given to this committee vide the government order dated February 10, 2014.
The youth also stressed that while both the leading political parties of the state might find it politically correct to support any such move to regularize encroachment on the river beds - the leadership of both of these political parties- chief minister Harish Rawat and leader of opposition and BJP State head Ajay Bhatt had separately committed themselves in writing to the streams revival campaign undertaken by MAD since their inception in June 2011. The group emphasised on the fact that the revival of the two streams is ecologically essential to keep Dehradun functional. MAD has also cited the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee report to supplement this exertion and has made it clear that if those slums which are on the river beds are also regularized, the NGO will avail legal remedies for corrective environmental action.