Drain deaths in east Delhi: AAP stages protest near Raj Niwas, demands LG's resignation

New Delhi: AAP leaders and workers on Saturday held a protest near the Raj Niwas demanding the resignation of Lt Governor V K Saxena over a woman and her child dying after they slipped into a water-logged drain in east Delhi.

While the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has claimed that the drain comes under the jurisdiction of the Lt Governor-headed DDA, the Raj Niwas has said the portion of the drain they slipped into was under the AAP-led Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD).

The woman and her son drowned in the drain of the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which is controlled by the LG, AAP MLA Kuldeep Kumar said during the protest.

"This was a murder, not an accident and the officers responsible for it should be charged with murder," Kumar said.

The protesters, raising slogans and demanding resignation of the LG, marched towards the Raj Niwas but were stopped by police at a barricade.

The LG office on Friday accused AAP leaders, including Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh, of issuing "patently false deliberately, misleading and blatantly improper" statements that the woman and her son drowned in a DDA drain.

"While this is undoubtedly another example of abuse and scoot typical of the AAP and its leadership, the fact of the matter is that the drain in which the unfortunate incident of drowning happened at Khoda colony belonged to the MCD under the control of AAP," the LG office said.

The 1,000-metre drain was neither desilted nor covered, it claimed.

The total length of the drain is 1,350 metres, out of which 1,000 metres falls in the jurisdiction of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), which was handed over to it by the DDA on April 17, 2023, the LG office said.

The AAP, however, claimed on Friday that the drain, which falls under the jurisdiction of MCD, transferred by the DDA, ends 25-30 metres away from the accident spot. "The drain maintained by DDA is at the entrance of the market, covered by RCC slabs, had an open manhole in which the child and the mother fell," the party said in a statement.

The LG should stop "misleading" the public, and accept accountability and announce compensation for the bereaved family, it added. A 22-year-old woman, Tanuja, and her three-year-old son, Priyansh, who had gone to a weekly market, drowned after they slipped into a drain in the Khoda Colony in the Ghazipur area of east Delhi.