Mumbai rains: Congress, NCP, BJP corner Sena as BMC fails to save city

Mumbai: On Friday, when the city was reeling under heavy downpour and came to a standstill, politics was at its peak as political parties including the Congress, NCP, and BJP corned the Shiv Sena over the BMC’s failure to keep the city flood free. Congress and NCP have also demanded a probe into the civic body’s monsoon work alleging thousands of crores scam in it.

On Friday, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was the first one to visit the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) Disaster Management Unit in the afternoon. He took a review of the situation and directed officials to issue regular advisories to people. After Fadnavis, other VIP visitors include Education Minister Vinod Tawde and Mumbai BJP chief Ashish Shelar too visited the disaster management unit.

Not to be left out, the Sena, too, sent Yuva Sena chief Aditya Thackeray to the Disaster management unit. With Aditya, Transport Minister Diwakar Raote and Mayor Snehal Ambekar were present. Later in the day, Shiv Sena party president Uddhav Thackeray also visited the disaster management unit.

Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) took the opportunity to blame the Sena-BJP and demanded a high-level inquiry into the corruption in the monsoon related work of civic body. “Mumbai is not the only island city. There are many other island cities in world which have never faced such kind of situations. Thousands of crores have been spent by the civic body in past ten years but the situation hasn’t changed at all. The Sena-BJP is responsible for Friday’s mess. It is a huge embarrassment that the financial capital comes to a standstill in the very first rains of the season,” said Nirupam.

Alleging a nexus between officials, contractors and Sena-BJP leaders in the civic body, Nirupam said, “Now, there is a need to set up an inquiry into Friday’s mismanagement and the corrupt practices taking place in the civic body for the past 22 years."

Dhananjay Munde, Opposition leader in the Legislative Council, alleged that there is a huge scam in pre-monsoon preparedness work including nullah cleaning works. “The scam amounts to Rs 4,000 crore in past ten years. An Anti-corruption probe must be conducted into it to punish those who are responsible for Friday’s mess in the city. This year, the civic body has spent Rs 150 crore on cleaning nullahs and despite that the city was completely waterlogged. Where has this money gone?” said Munde.

The Samajwadi Party slammed the visits by political leaders to the disaster cell of BMC. “It was felt that they were indulging in disaster tourism. Civic body’s Disaster Management Unit is not the Gateway of India for everyone to visit during the heavy rains. If the Sena-BJP leaders were so concerned, they should have ensured that the BMC and its contractors had done their work efficiently and on time,” said Rais Shaikh, Samajwadi Party group leader in the BMC.

While the BJP did not attack the Sena directly on Friday, it had already disputed the BMC’s claims of cleaning up the city’s drains. Earlier this month, BJP corporators in the civic body had alleged that the entire nullah cleaning work was a complete eye wash and all claims were false.

However, the Shiv Sena has blamed the rain saying that the city has received average rain of 15 days in just 24 hours. “We don’t control the rains. It’s so bad, we cannot do anything,” said Arvind Sawant, Shiv Sena MP from South Mumbai.