A road in Pandav Nagar in East Delhi was in very bad condition. It had not been repaired for the last several years. People applied under the Right to Information Act and asked when was it last repaired and when would it be repaired next. The residents filed an application in April 2002 with the Engineering wing of Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). To their horror, they got a reply that the road had been last repaired in the month of March 2002 and had been repaired several times in the last three years. This meant that all the material and labour claimed to have been spent on this road had been siphoned off. Next the people asked, through another application under the Right to Information Act, copies of contracts of all the repairs done in the last few years. MCD replied that there were no contracts as the work was done departmentally. The people then asked, through another application, for the copies of stock registers through which the material for the repair was issued. The copy arrived and it showed how bitumen drums and cement bags had been issued several times in the past for the repair of this road, which was never carried out. |
