Despite Its Flaws, Delhi’s Poor Count the AAP Govt as Their Own

How has the AAP government fared with education, health, safety and public transport? Read to find out.

Despite the noise, chaos, discord and controversy that have marked much of the three years of Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government and frayed the support of its middle-class voters, it continues to enjoy the trust of the city’s poor people who believe it genuinely feels for them.

The failure of the party to form a government or become a strong opposition in Punjab in elections held last year has humbled its leadership. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has had the sense to realise that he risks losing his home turf if he uses Delhi voters as mere stepping stones for his national ambition and neglects governance for which they gave him a strong mandate.

Instead of daily taunts and jibes at Prime Minister Narenda Modi, the Chief Minister seems to be practicing Vipassana at work; he has fallen silent and is putting his energy to better uses, like reforming the water supply board.

The Performance of Delhi’s Power Distribution Companies

The three private electricity distribution companies – one owned by the Tatas and two others by the Anil Ambani group – have been cut to size. They had a cosy relationship with the Sheila Dikshit government which was sympathetic to their demands for periodic tariff increases and did not recover a loan of Rs 3,450 cr given at the time of privatisation in 2002. The AAP government has been skeptical about their loss claims.

It believes they have been inflating their costs and capital expenditure and had wanted their accounts scrutinized by the government’s auditor. But the Delhi High Court disallowed it. The matter is now before the Supreme Court.

The Ambani companies have also gone to the apex court to have their loss claims recognised and compensated after the state’s electricity regulator approved a much lower claim. The hearings were concluded in February 2015, but no order has been passed.

One of the first acts the government did upon assuming office was to cut by half the rate for monthly household consumption of electricity up to 400 units. Every poor household is also entitled to 20,000 litres of free water a month.

This has endeared the government to its core constituency.

The water tanker mafia has been checked but not fully controlled. The subsidy for electricity is not paid up front. Rather, the government is adjusting it against amounts which the distribution companies owe the government for power purchased from its generating plants.

Overall, the power distribution companies are in better financial health. The fall in the cost of power over the past two years has helped. The government has also been accommodating on their pension liabilities. A surcharge on tariffs has improved cash flow.

In the summer of 2017, the power companies were comfortably able to meet the peak daily demand of 6526 MW, which was more than that of Mumbai and Chennai combined. and not 6300 MW. 

Education Sector Given Thrust Under AAP

Education and health have been the biggest thrust areas of the government.

The pass percentage at the senior secondary level had risen from 74% in 1999 to 88% in 2012. At the secondary level it had gone up from 50 percent to 99 percent.

The credit goes to not only the AAP government. Of course, the previous Congress government had also emphasised schooling and efforts were made to improve staffing, facilities and learning outcomes of Delhi government schools (distinct from those run by the municipal corporations).

The present government has increased the share of education expenditure in the budget from about 18 percent in 2013-14 to 24 percent in 2017-18. Twenty-four schools have been built and about 8,000 classrooms are being added. Another 10,000 class rooms are planned.

More than that, efforts have been made to raise learning outcomes by improving the quality of teaching. Facility managers have been appointed in schools, so principals can devote themselves to teaching and education. Some of them have been sent to Cambridge University for training. Mentor teachers are being trained in Singapore.

The assistance of IITs and IIMs and those of NGOs in the education sector like Pratham have been enlisted.

A new curriculum is being devised with foreign experts. Teaching methods are also being revamped.

This correspondent was impressed with the facilities at Sarvodaya Kendriya Vidyalaya, a government school in West Delhi. The premises were spic and span. The toilets were clean. The class rooms were well lit. Free meals were hygienically served. The auditorium was impressive. Nursery classes were cheerful. Attendance was being monitored online; it was above 75 percent, the principal said. But students lacked confidence and their grasp of subjects was inadequate.

Teachers said they were overloaded with non-teaching work, like answering queries under the Right to Information Act. There was no teacher for Sanskrit and the Commerce faculty was two short. The other teachers had to double up. The poverty of the students and the illiteracy of their parents affected their grasp of subjects and concepts.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who has the education portfolio, has been holding mega meetings of parents with teachers so that their grievances are redressed and they are updated about the government’s efforts. But parents still seem to be unhappy with government schools.

A survey by an NGO Praja Foundation citing data collected through Right to Information applications showed that 85,000 students had dropped out of the government school system in 2016-17. The problem was acute in municipal schools.

The preference for private schools has increased their pricing power.

As with the electricity distribution companies, the government has for the first time cracked down on their tendency to extort fees. It has forced some of them to refund the excess they had charged. They have also been forced to comply with the obligation to enroll poor students; the system has been made online.

In the health sector, a three-tier system of mohalla clinics in neighbourhoods, poly clinics above them and hospitals for tertiary care has been initiated. The waiting time of half-an-hour to one hour at the clinics testifies to their popularity.

The clinics throw up information of epidemics at the incubation stage. But the government has failed to act in coordination with the BJP-controlled municipal corporations in improving sanitation and garbage collection. Consequently, the city has been regularly preyed upon by a number of easily preventable, vector-borne communicable diseases.

Notable Failure? Public Transportation

The government has not procured buses in the numbers required to keep private vehicles off the road. It blames the unavailability of land for depots and terminals. Land is a central subject and the Lieutenant Governor has not been cooperating.

The inexperience of the government is a factor.

The state bus transport corporation is loss-making. It lost over Rs 3,500 cr in 2015-16, when Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation notched up a small profit of Rs 14 cr, though their fleet sizes are comparable (BMTC slipped into losses of Rs 260 cr the following year).

The hostility of the central government has also manifested in two rounds of fare increases of the Delhi Metro last year. This has affected ridership. The Metro is jointly owned by the central and state governments.

Safety and Other Concerns

The safety of women in a city known for aggressive males and ingrained patriarchal attitudes remains a concern, though in Swati Maliwal, the Delhi Commission of Women has a chairperson who is earnest, empathetic and enthusiastic. She has had quite a few run-ins on issues of domestic violence and human trafficking with the Delhi Police, which answers to the Central Government.

There is a sense of security among minorities in the city, unlike in the neighbouring BJP-ruled states where Muslims and Christians have been harassed and even killed.

Despite efforts by some TV channels and BJP leaders to give a religious colour to last week’s honour killing of a Hindu youth by the father of the Muslim girl he was in love with, communal peace has held. The serial attacks on Christian churches and schools that happened during President’s Rule in Delhi ceased after the AAP government was re-elected in February 2015.

It is hard to say whether corruption has declined. The party had made anti-corruption its poll plank and had even sacrificed the government in 2014, after a brief 49 days in office, over the Assembly rejecting its Lok Pal bill.

Slum improvement is another area where there has been little action, though it is a complicated task because of the multiplicity of agencies involved.

The government needs to have a strategy to control air pollution; knee-jerk reactions like odd-even do not help.

Street vendors need to be given security, facilities and designated spaces to operate. There is little thought given to street-food hygiene. One had expected Kejriwal as an IIT-trained engineer to streamline public works and check the waste of public money owing to repetitive digging of roads and footpaths. He has not delivered on that score.

AAP supporters had high expectations of the government.

Hopes of quiet efficiency were perhaps misplaced given the inexperience of the leaders. Those who expected democratic functioning would be saddened by its autocratic turn. But the government must also be cut some slack because of the hostility it has faced from the central government and non-cooperation from the municipal corporations.

The Delhi government has accountability but no authority. Overall, disappointment with the government will not be such as to push its core supporters to the other more established parties.

(Vivian Fernandes is an editor of www.smartindianagriculture.in. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)