Ad spend vs pandemic policyWhile the Delhi government was advertising itself through the pandemic, the realities on ground were starkly different. In March 2020, just after the lockdown was announced, the Kejriwal had stated that his government would compensate landlords whose tenants were not able to pay the rent as a result of the situation. He also promised strict action against landlords found harassing their tenants.However, 18 months after the announcement, the Delhi government informed the Delhi High Court in September that its promise of paying a poor tenant’s rent during the Covid-19 pandemic was still under consideration. On July 22, the court had ruled that a CM’s promise to citizens was enforceable and directed the AAP government to the extent. The bench had asked the government: “Are you ready to pay even 1 per cent?” The hearing in the case was initiated after five daily wagers and a landlord moved the High Court for enforcement of the “promise” made by Kejriwal.In March 2020, the Delhi government promised Rs 5,000 relief to all construction workers affected due to the lockdown and two months later in May 2020, after a meeting with the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board, labour minister Gopal Rai said the government would launch an online portal where the construction workers could register to avail the scheme.The issues here were two-fold — many unorganised sector workers were not registered and several of them could not register because the registration process online itself was fraught with complexities that many of them could not navigate. They had to shell, during the lockdown, several hundreds of rupees to simply register. The Delhi government then had insisted that the construction workers had to register online to be eligible for their benefits. By May 2020, the Delhi government has paid Rs 5,000 to just 40,000 workers, which was not even a fraction of the workers in the Capital, said Animesh, the IFTU-Delhi president.The High Court bench of Justices Vipin Sanghi and Rekha Palli had slammed the Delhi government early this year for failing to utilise thousands of rupees lying in the corpus under the Building and Other Construction Workers Welfare Cess Act.Despite Kejriwal promising in March 2020 that the number of night shelters would also be increased in the city to help the migrant workers, the Delhi Urban Shelter improvement Board (DUSIB) had only increased a few in December 2020 for winter. This too happened after a Supreme Court order as a result of which a state level monitoring committee was constituted to look into the matter in August 2020.
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