With Delhi hit by one of the worst floods in recent history, bringing in a lot silt and debris in its wake, sanitation workers across the capital are working round-the-clock to ensure that the roads are back to normal. The tasks that the workers have to perform include installing pump to remove water, lifting carcasses of animals, cleaning drains of silt, and implementing anti-mosquito measures. “I've been cleaning this road for two days now, and every time I get close to finishing, it rains again. The road becomes waterlogged, and all the silt that I've accumulated gets deposited into the drains again,” Uday Veer, a sanitation worker in the municipal SP Zone, said. With the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) being the principal body in charge of the city's cleanliness, its Safai Karamcharis or sanitation workers are now operating in three shifts, according to an official. The sanitation personnel are not being allowed to take leave even as no additional workforce is being roped in for the task, said a worker. “MCD today removed 13.5 cubic meters of debris and repaired 23.5 square meters of roads… so far, 1,300 dead animals have also been removed from flood-affected areas,” the MCD said in its statement on Tuesday. Said Mohammad Nafeez, a labour incharge in Civil Lines, “Sanitation workers are standing in water for 5-6 hours at a stretch and unclogging the drains.” Workers who are operating jetting machines have their own challenges. “There is no time to catch a breath…work is being assigned day and night on emergency basis, the tank of my jetting machines has a 10000 L capacity and I am emptying 20 to 30 such tanks in a day,” a jetting spray operator named Rakesh said. An MCD official said, “No additional workforce has been deployed because cleaning the city is the responsibility of MCD sanitation staff. The sanitation workers are not experiencing any difficulties in post-flood cleanup. Their salaries are also being generated on time since two months.”
