The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) plans to hire private agencies for improvement and maintenance of its larger parks in the city, officials said on Sunday. The private agencies will be responsible for gardening and its maintenance, cleaning and sweeping of gardens, pruning, trimming and shaping of shrubs and maintenance of nursery, among other things.
The civic body will first outsource maintenance of all its parks having an area of one acre or more in the Karol Bagh zone on a pilot basis, officials said. MCD has invited bids for hiring a company for the project which is expected to cost ₹3.6 crore a year, they said.
A senior MCD official said that the horticulture department has also prepared a project report in this regard.
Anotherofficial said that the project conditions will also hold the contractor accountable as they will be required to upload of photographs of the park on a mobile application, and address locals’ complaints.
“We are working on outsourcing park maintenance in Karol Bagh to a specialised agency. It is likely to cost around ₹3.6 crore per year. If the project is successful, we may extend it to other zones,” the official, not wishing to be named, said.
The move by MCD comes amid a shortage of gardeners to manage city’s parks — the corporation manages 15,226 parks across the city which cover an area of 5,172.07 acres.
The second civic official cited above said that Karol Bagh alone has 762 small and big — 42 larger parks have an area of more than 4,047sqm, 119 parks have an area of 2,023.5sqm to 4,047sqm, and the remaining have a smaller area.
The larger parks (bigger than one acre) include important ones such as Ajmal Khan park, Mini Stadium Park, Naraina Vihar, Chacha Nehru Park, Gaushala Wala, Prem Nagar, Jhandelwalan park among others.
“Outsourcing the work to expert agencies is expected to make park management economical. We are expecting it to ensure better upkeep of parks. It will help in resolving citizen complaints about park maintenance and staff shortages promptly. All the work being carried out the by the agency will be supervised by the zonal officer,” the official said.
“Any complaints raised must be attended by the contractor within 10 days along with photographs on a mobile application. A penalty of ₹500 per day will be levied per complaint. Similar provisions of hefty fines have been made in case of violations related to lack of upkeep or non presence of workers,” the official added.
Atul Goyal, head of the RWA federation URJA, said that MCD had earlier signed MOUs with RWAs to manage parks but payments were delayed by several years which led to failure of the project. “Simply handing over parks to private parties will not work, they will have to rope in RWAs to monitor the work. In case of MOUs with RWAs, we found expenses were at least ₹40,000 to 50,000 per acre but the money was not enough. At least minimum wages need to be paid. Unless these issues are tackled at planning level, the project is unlikely to succeed,” he said.
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