For MCD officials, trifurcation costly, tiresome

New Delhi, April 20 (IANS) Officials of the trifurcated Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) are battling chaos and confusion as they go about dividing the civic body's infrastructure into three parts. With the election results out, they are racing against time to finish the process by April-end.

The MCD, one of the largest civic bodies in the world, has been divided into East Delhi Municipal Corporation, South Delhi Municipal Corporation and North Delhi Municipal Corporation. But senior MCD officials say redistributing project papers and segregating crockery and furniture is proving to be difficult.

"It is taxing. For a month, we have been segregating project papers of each department for each corporation. We will also have a nodal officer in each department to coordinate with the other corporations. The segregation and photocopying will lead to confusion. It will take us at least eight months to settle down after the trifurcation process is over," an official said.

"Each corporation will have a copy of all project files and another copy will be kept in the central record room at Civil Lines. We have also started dividing the manpower and the infrastructure," he said.

While the office for east Delhi will be at the Delhi State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation building in Patparganj, the ones for south and north will be at the 28-storey MCD Civic Centre at Vivekanand Marg in the heart of the capital for the time being. The south office will later move to a new place in Dwarka.

""The north and south corporations will share the existing civic centre building for the time being, but soon a new building will be constructed for the south corporation in Dwarka. Work for physical trifurcation is on in full swing. We have been at it for the past one month. We hope the three new corporation will be functioning independently as expected by April end," Yogendra Mann Singh, spokesperson of the MCD, told IANS.

The challenges for the officials are photocopying and dividing documents of current projects into the three corporations.

MCD officials are trying to divide furniture, work stations and crockery worth nearly Rs.30 crore.

Sharing e-governance data would also be a tiresome and costly affair, said officials.

"The e-governance project runs on 52 servers. It is difficult to divide the servers into three corporations since each server performs a dedicated task," said a senior official at the MCD IT department who declined to be identified.

"To have 52 servers for each corporation will add to the financial burden. Dividing IT services is going to be challenging."

Senior officials said they were unhappy about the trifurcation since it would take away their powers and superiority.

"Trifurcation is a big blow to all senior officials. From May, we will be associated only with a particular civic body and not the MCD. Even our juniors who are inexperienced will get senior positions in another corporation," said a senior official in the MCD engineering department.

The MCD provides services to an estimated population of 11,007,835 million residents, or 98 percent of the total population of the Indian capital.

According to the MCD website, it serves 95 percent of Delhi's total land area, next only to Tokyo (Japan).

In elections to the trifurcated MCD held April 15, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) retained control, securing 138 of 272 seats, while the Congress improved its last time's tally of 64 and ended up with 77 seats.

(Prathiba Raju can be contacted at prathiba.r@ians.in)