With elections heading closer, Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit on Wednesday held an emergency meeting with her Cabinet Ministers and directed them to publicise Government’s achievements.
The Chief Minister also directed her Ministers to speed up their pending projects and plans and come out with full facts and figures to counter Opposition BJP’s propaganda. She has also stressed for better media management ahead of coming Assembly polls in November this year. Dikshit made special mention of the negative publicity on the regularisation of 895 unauthorised colonies.
“She also cautioned her Cabinet colleagues over the Opposition’s possible attempts to malign image of the Government. Dikshit was more worried on the negative reporting regarding regularisation of unauthorised colonies,” said the sources.
The Chief Minister has advised her colleagues to speed up development works in unauthorised colonies and counter the baseless allegations being made by the Opposition on the issue of water and power.
According to sources, some Ministers, during the meeting, also complained that they do not have efficient information officers that were deterrent in publicising their good works. Dikshit directed the Ministers to hire information officials if needed.
The issue of regularisation of 895 unauthorised colonies has become a cause of worry as the urban development department has failed to issue gazette notification till date. The Government had issued notification order for regularisation of these colonies in September 10, 2012. Urban Development secretary RK Srivastava has written a letter to his counter part in Urban Development, requesting to ratify the guidelines for regularisation of unauthorised colonies.
“About 583 colonies are mix up of private and public lands and till such time cost of land for the public land is recovered, the colony would not get legally regularised. Similarly, 450 colonies do not meet the built up percentage of norms of minimum 50 per cent as required in 2007 and also may not be having 10 per cent in the year 2002 to prove their existence as on March 31, 2002. The present ground situation would be entirely different and the regularisations may need to be amended to bring those unauthorised colonies that existed on March 31, 2002 within the ambit of regularisation,” Srivastava said in the letter.