The political bickering between the BJP-ruled civic agencies and the AAP Government is said to be squarely responsible for the poor dengue situation in the national Capital. Though experts warned about the impending dengue outbreak, which is now an annual phenomenon in the national Capital, the municipal bodies and the Delhi Government did not seem to have made adequate preparations to check the spread of the vector-borne disease. While 21 people have already lost their lives to the deadly mosquito-inflicted disease so far, the politics over the vector-borne ailment reached a new high on Friday with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal holding an emergency meeting with MlAs and briefed them on the dos and dont's of dengue.
This year, the municipal bodies responsible for taking active measures, to check the spread of dengue were least bothered to carry out fumigation drive to rid the city of the deadly Aedes mosquitoes. Even the Delhi Government was seen lagging behind in taking precautionary measures by launching awareness campaigns to prevent the spread of the disease.
The Delhi Government woke up only after a seven-year-old boy, who was denied admission by different hospitals, who later on succumbed to the deadly disease. Shocked over the death of their son, the boy's parents, both from Odisha, committed suicide by jumping off from the roof of a school in ladu Sarai.
"Just after the boy's death,fumigation was done by the civic agencies for two days in our area," a resident of ladu Sari told this newspaper. "Now, there has been no fumigation for the past few days. We are all scared." A middle-aged man said that neither BJP MP Ramesh Bhiduri, nor AAP MlA Naresh Yadav or Congress Councillor Anita Chaudhary bothered to visit the area. "This shows the commitment of the politicians towards the welfare of their people."
As the dengue seemed to be getting out of control, the AAP Government has now asked the Urban Development (UD) department to explore whether MlA local area development (lAD) fund could be provided to the legislators to buy fogging machines. There is a thinking in the Government that the MlAs can use their funds to sanitize their respective constituencies. Through this exercise, a highly placed source said that the AAP Government was trying to settle score with the BJP.
The seriousness of the political parties about the dengue epidemic can be gauged from the fact that in the last three years there has been an alarming decline in the allocation of funds for prevention of the vector-borne diseases. Between 2012 and 2015, the BJP-led Union Government's allocation to Delhi for controlling vector-borne diseases came down from about Rs 50 crore to just Rs 17 crore. The Delhi Government, in turn, allocated a smaller proportion of its funds to the three municipal corporations. The share of funds for controlling vector-borne diseases went down from about 10 per cent of the total expenditure by the directorate of health services to just short of 5 per cent in the same period.
At a high level meeting held by the Union health ministry, it was pointed out that all four serotypes of Dengue have been isolated from Delhi from time to time. Officials said that in 2015 there were 3.6 per cent dengue cases in the children below the age of five years, 22.9 per cent in 6 to 15 year age group, 64.4 per cent in 16-45 year group and 9.1 per cent in 45 and above age group. They said that the transmission of the disease was occurring more amongst the age group of school going and extra domiciliary workforce.