The outbreak shows that when civic management goes awry and garbage clearance takes the back seat, diseases will fester. It is time our politicians stop their blame game and clean up their act
By Aruna Singh
IN the annals of Delhi’s medical history, 2015 will go down as the Year of the Dengue. The virus, transmitted by the Aedes mosquito, has been making the headlines for over a month now. One hears scary stories from virtually every corner. Visuals of desperate patients waiting outside overcrowded city hospitals have hogged prime time. The cases of children being refused admission by private hospitals have dominated media discussions. Doctors and health experts have been spelling out the dos and don’ts, should one contract a persistent fever, cough, body-ache—the first sign of the body having been infected by the much feared virus. Platelet counts of family members, friends and colleagues have become the topic of much discussion.
The official figures put the number of cases at 3,194. But a Press Trust of India report quoting a civic official talks of a record 5,471 cases this year and 25 deaths due to dengue. The number of houses found positive for mosquito breeding stood at 1,87,691. But the statistics do not quite reflect the panic that has gripped the city. Suddenly, everyone is asking, and rightly so, as to why things have come to such a pass. Has the virus mutated? Has the dengue vector become better adapted to Delhi’s weather conditions? Is the health infrastructure of the city—read hospitals—to blame? Or is it the civic situation—stagnant water and uncleared garbage which have provided breeding grounds for the mosquito—also responsible?
Perhaps, all these factors have contributed. But there is also a political vector involved. The root cause of the civic and administrative failure is the lack of coordination between the local bodies and the state government and the latter with the government at the centre. This is the result of different political dispensations that control the three arms of governance refusing to see eye to eye even in a crisis.
And into this mix comes Delhi’s Lt Governor, Najeeb Jung. There is no love lost between him and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal or the Aam Aadmi Party, currently in power in the national capital.
Given all this, the predictable blame game has already begun. But the end-sufferers of this politicking have been the common citizens. Not just those infected by the virus but also those who panic and do not know where to go for treatment. Also, preventive measures to check the spread of the virus and control the breeding of mosquitoes have taken a hit. Garbage clearance and fumigation of vulnerable areas have taken a hit.
In the months before the outbreak of dengue, Delhi would well have qualified to be the garbage and filth capital of the world. If one ventured outside the diplomatic enclave and the bungalows where our ministers and parliamentarians reside, then refuse could be seen strewn on the streets. The Prime Minister’s much touted Swachh Bharat campaign has been floundering in his own backyard. It did not help when sanitation workers went on strike in May because they were not paid wages. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) said it was strapped by a shortage of funds and blamed the state government for not releasing monies in time. As the garbage piled up civic experts warned of the hazards—they did not predict dengue but said that the refuse would lead to health issues.
And then dengue hit.
The MCD has been crying foul again. It says sufficient funds were not allocated by the state government to fight or contain the spread of the epidemic. Says Mohan Bhardwaj, head of the standing committee on health, a common monitoring and decision-making body of the corporation: “We were promised Rs37.5 crore to fight vector borne diseases. The state government gave us Rs3.22 crore for all the three corporations—the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation and East Delhi Muni-cipal Corporation. The three have so far spent Rs2.98 crore. How could we manage in such less money?”
The Delhi government on its part claims that it has given 75 percent of the total annual amount to be disbursed under the Dengue Malaria Control Programme (DMCP) to the MCD. In response to a PIL, it submitted to the Delhi High Court that Rs61 crore out of an annual budget of `81 crore for DMCP was disbursed. The annual budget for fighting vector borne diseases in 2015 was Rs81.52 crore. The state government released the funds in two instalments—the first instalment of 25 percent which came to Rs20.38 crore and second of 50 percent, amounting to Rs40.76 crore.
But what was left unstated was that the second instalment, which constitutes the substantial part of the total allocation, was released only on September 22, much after the epidemic broke out. “Our employees have been working without pay for three months. We have nearly 1,500 Domestic Breeder Checkers (DBCs), who check for dengue mosquitoes and larvae in households across Delhi. We also put nearly 900 field workers who check for malaria mosquito, on duty for dengue this year. All of them have worked incessantly to control dengue without salaries this year,” says Bhardwaj.
He is right about non-payment of salaries to workers and the problems they have been through. However, Bhardwaj errs when he talks of the commitment of the MCD workers and the effort they put in. Residents of Delhi allege that the MCD has not checked the water tanks and other stagnant water regularly, though they have marked many dates outside houses indicating when checks were made.
Rittika Modwel, a resident of Malviya Nagar, Delhi, shares her typical experience: “MCD workers came to our house to check if there were any mosquito larvae in our overhead water tank. There were. but the next time they came they never checked if we had removed the larvae from our tank.”
She adds that the workers did not even tell her the method to clean the tank and she had to depend on information from the internet. Incidentally, her house has five dates pencilled near the main door when inspections were supposedly carried out by the MCD.
Health experts are agreed that the best way to stop dengue is to prevent the breeding of mosquito larvae. And this can only be done through a concentrated campaign in which public awareness and participation is of prime importance. This aspect took a backseat amidst all the power politics played out between the state government, the MCD and the centre. No pamphlets were issued underscoring the need to keep the environs clean. No messages on FM radio or TV. Even hoardings and posters stressing the need to keep Dilli Swacch were missing. The Delhi government’s PR had promos eulogising the merits of the chief minister and the centre had national building aspects in its focus.
Even when ads appeared it was how to fight dengue and not how to prevent it. Even that was short on information. When civil society organisations and health activists held a protest demonstration at Delhi Secretariat on September 23, one of their main allegations was that money was being wasted on advertisements which had come up across the city without much information. “We see hoardings advertising the Delhi government’s fight against dengue. But none of them inform how one should avoid getting infected or what to do if one suspects that one may be infected. We demand that this money should be utilised to treat the patients rather than advertising about the chief minister,” says Annie Raja, general secretary, National Federation of Indian Women, affiliated to the Communist Party of India.
The government says the job of information dissemination lies with the local bodies. “The MCDs are responsible for prevention, which includes awareness creation, while the state government has to ensure treatment. The treatment in the city is fine. It is prevention that has taken a hit,” says RN Das, officer on special duty with Delhi’s health minister, Satyendra Jain.
When it comes to owning up responsibility, the lines blur. But Delhi happens to be the national capital. And it does not do the nation any good if it fights a losing battle against dirt and disease while claiming to be an emerging global power. This should serve as a wakeup call for everyone who has a stake in Delhi. Remember a clean city is the first step towards fighting diseases like dengue.
You can’t blame the mosquito for civic decay and degradation.