Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has taken up the responsibility of restarting the greening and landscaping of the Public Works Department (PWD) roads, painting of zebra crossings and foothpaths as well as redesigning some roads in Delhi.
The discussion on road infrastructure was taken up during a meeting with lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal on Wednesday, at a time when the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) Government is at loggerheads with its own PWD and has passed a resolution to suspend PWD Principal Secretary Ashwini Kumar in the just-concluded Delhi Assembly's special session. Delhi's woes of massive water-clogging and heavy traffic jams have increased since the rains lashed it this monsoon.
"Had a good meeting wid Hon'ble lG. 3 decisions —restart work of greening and landscaping PWD roads, paint all zebra and footpaths, redesign some roads," Kejriwal tweeted.
Baijal had called upon the CM after news reports about Kejriwal asking the officials about the work on the bottlenecks of the city.
Baijal apprised the CM about the six task forces that were constituted by him in the month of January. "Each convened by concerned DCP Range (Traffic) to identify congested corridors and suggest short-term as well as medium, long term solutions for smooth flow of traffic. These Task Forces conducted extensive field visits and studies and submitted a list of 77 corridors out of which 28 were identified as Category-A "Priority" corridors. Separately, the encroachments on each of these were also identified for appropriate action as per law," said a statement by the Governor.
While Baijal thanked him for "showing keen" interest, he presented him with the list of 28 corridors that need priority based attention." last week, AAP leader and MlA Saurabh Bharadwaj presented a report of the Committee on Petitions in Delhi Assembly underling the callousness of the PWD officials.
Kejriwal had earlier written to Chief Secretary MM Kutty about PWD secretary Kumar. While the air is not clear between the department and the government, the concerns of the Delhi roads are worrisome.
In April last year, Kejriwal had launched the 'Greening Delhi' initiative aimed at tackling dust, a major source of air pollution in the national Capital. He had set October, 2016 as the deadline but the work never really took off.