Flooded roads and scarcity of drinking water plagued parts of Delhi amid an intense blame game between Delhi’s AAP and Haryana’s BJP government over the unprecedented flood situation in the national capital. The Yamuna water which entered the city on Thursday started receding on Friday night though Delhi’s ITO remains under water on Saturday morning. As chief minister Arvind Kejriwal thanked the Army Engineer regiment for opening the ITO barrage after working for 20 hours without a break, BJP’s Amit Malviya said while Army engineers did all the work, Kejriwal only tweeted to take credit.
Delhi vs Haryana over Hathnikund water release
The AAP on Friday shared a video claiming that the BJP government in Haryana diverted all water from the Hathnikund barrage towards Delhi, while the Uttar Pradesh side was dry.
The Haryana government said the claim was misleading as the CWC guideline stipulated that if the water is more than 1 lakh cusec, then it can’t be streamed into Western Yamuna and Eastern Yamuna Canal (the other routes apart from Delhi). There is nothing controversial in it and an unnecessary controversy is being created over it, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar’s advisor retired IAS Devendra Singh said.
Yamuna flood: Latest water level
The water level of Yamuna witnessed a steady decline and was recorded at 207,98 metres at 11pm on Friday at the Old Railway Bridge.
‘This was bound to happen…’: Gautam Gambhir
BJP MP Gautam Gambhir said it is unfortunate that the Capital got flooded and the chief minister said that the city’s systems were prepared to take only around 100 mm of rain. “Then what did you do in the past years? But this is not surprising at all because this is what happens when you do freebie politics instead of developing the city’s infrastructure,” Gautam Gambhir said.
VK Saxena vs Kejriwal
On Friday, Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena went to inspect the damaged drain regulator at the ITO where chief minister Kejriwal, Delhi ministers Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj were present. “I, too, can say a lot of things but this isn’t what we should do at this time,” the L-G said at the presence of Kejriwal and the ministers. L-G’s comments came after Saurabh Bharadwaj claimed that there was a delay in the deployment of the NDRF teams. “We wrote to the chief secretary on WhatsApp group last night to call NDRF else water might enter sensitive areas of Delhi… But, our messages were ignored,” Bharadwaj said.
