The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) is set to present its annual Budget for 2016-17 on Wednesday which is likely to focus on the ‘Smart City’ project however; many of the proposed projects in last year’s Budget are still on paper. For the year 2015-2016, a slew of announcements were made that are still to take off but there is no clarity on whether or not any projects have been scrapped.
For 2015-2016, the Budget estimate had an expenditure of Rs3,126 crore and receipt of Rs3,153 crore with a surplus of Rs27 crore.
It may be noted that the NDMC had proposed to procure at least 0.25 per cent electricity (of its total power needs) from waste-to-energy plants, but that plan, too, remains on paper. Moreover, the proposals to set up 18,500 ‘smart’ electricity poles and projects to start a world-class football academy, a skill development training centre, and an all-women’s cab service, among others, are in limbo since their announcement in January last year.
NDMC officials claim that the projects have either failed to take off or are pending due to change in the departmental heads.
“The civic-body had no chairman for over three months last year. A few projects suffered due to the transition phase. Then there was the reshuffling of certain departmental heads which also positively or negatively affected the pace of projects,” said a senior NDMC official.
An ambitious project for replacing 18,500 street light poles with lED lights, mount CCTV cameras on them and provide Wi-Fi services simultaneously ran into legal trouble after the NDMC signed a letter of intent with Indus Towers and Reliance Jio challenged in Delhi High Court the terms of the tender as being vague.
For its plan to set up several waste-to-energy plants, the civic body had zeroed in on three technologies — methanisation, pyrolytic gasification and hybrid gasification. Other projects for which NDMC had floated tenders a year back but that did not see the light of day include the setting up of an open air restaurant on Palika Bazaar’s rooftop, art streets on Kharak Singh Marg, installation of ‘smart signages’ for heritage sites and monuments and allotment of smart ID cards to street vendors.
NMDC director (Projects), Neeraj Bharti said, “A few of the projects, such as the football academy, needed some rework which we realised later. Tenders will be re-floated for them after some homework.”