OPINION

While sharing a picture of a family outing from the memory lane on the Facebook, one captioned it as ‘when Delhi was not a gas chamber.’ This had an immediate response from a naysayer friend asking when Delhi was not a gas chamber.

Well if we talk about air quality, I am very sure as per the measurement standards it must never have been good and always rested in the bad, worse, alarming categories. But despite that Delhi in the pre-Covid days was a city to be in. The wide expanses hosting huge fetes and fairs were worth a visit.

Before the onset of Omicron one had thought that Delhi’s winter would be back to normal with ‘mela’ grounds hosting people in large numbers over the weekends. Alas that was not to be. The new strain has put paid to any ideas one had about ‘enjoying the winter.’

The sit-ins, dharnas, demonstrations, burning the effigies of the political leaders and making the use of the media etc. to express dissent or protest against a state decision/policy are the constitutionally permitted democratic means used by individuals and the collectives – parties/pressure groups/ social movements.

Even blockade of railways for a while were forgiven by the people as the exercise of political rights by the actors involved apart from the conventional methods of organizing rallies, distribution of pamphlets, taking delegation/s to the minister/prime minister or the authority concerned for the mitigation of the grievance or opposition of the decision.

But a clear line was drawn by the protesters between pressure and coercion. Both the government and the protesters/dissenters were open to each other without any adamancy.

As we enter into 2022, the residents of the national Capital should remember that it’s going to be the year for the municipal elections in the national Capital. There are two major local elections for Delhi – state assembly and the municipal polls.

Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) prior to 2012 ran an administration which was almost parallel to the Delhi Government in the matter of territorial coverage. In 2012, the Sheila Dikshit government pushed for decentralization and got the monolith municipal body divided into three corporations – North, South and East.

While some say that it was a ploy by Dikshit to wean back the municipal bodies under the Congress fold but she did not succeed and in 2012 it once again went back to the BJP. The same story got repeated in 2017, when despite the rout in the assembly polls at the hands of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), BJP managed to bounce back and held control of all the three corporations.

As we enter the last week of the year, and as has been the norm in the newspapers it’s the time to look back. For a resident of national Capital region, looking back at the year which is about to end can only give a feeling of déjà vu.

The winter has set in with the chilly winds but one can’t be complaining. Thank the good God for having send those winds to Delhi to clear it of the poisonous air. For about a decade now, the citizens are forced to live in gas chambers and then the Gods send winds which makes breathing somewhat easy.

If the Gods were not there, matters would not have been helped. Despite the huge insertions in the newspapers with a smiling chief minister announcing installation of smog towers, Delhi’ites failed to get fresh air even within the 100 metres radius of these highly publicized devise to clear the air. At least there is no data to reflect towards that.

A few months back, in the midst of the hullabaloo over those with 100 percent marks being denied admission, one had reported the true health of Delhi University. The statistics of the applications received for admission to the under-graduate courses told a story which was alarming. From 3.53 lakh applications received in 2021, the numbers had come down to 2.90 lakh in 2021, a steep fall of about 18% percent.

The fall in numbers were attributed to many factors including Covid-created lockdowns and shutdowns. But the most alarming was the fact that such scenario was not faced by the other universities in the national Capital like the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprashtha University (GGSIPU) and Ambedkar University of Delhi (AUD).

This was largely attributable to the highly inflated cut-off lists put out by Delhi University colleges. Even some ram shackle colleges in the outskirts expecting genuinely good students to join was probably over estimation of brand DU. With DU failing to provide hardly any professional courses at the under-graduate level, the students sought options elsewhere.