70 pc of Delhi MLAs 'underperforming, 33 pc hardly participated in Assembly discussions: Report

NEW DELHI: The AAP is "not" being different from other parties with over 70 per cent of Delhi MLAs found to be "underperforming", even compared to Mumbai's BJP, Shiv Sena and Congress legislators. In fact, nearly 33 per cent of the Delhi MLAs, overwhelmingly belonging to the AAP, hardly participated in discussions, data collated from Assembly sessions held in 2015 show. The findings, part of a report released by Praja Foundation here today, also claim that despite the government and municipalities having received 10,102 complaints related to mosquito nuisance and fogging last year, no MLA raised the issue in the House. "72 per cent of the MLAs are underperforming in terms of quality of issues raised in the House. The Mumbai MLAs are doing far better in this respect," the report says. It ranked AAP's SK Bagga, Nitin Tyagi and BJP's Jagdish Pradhan as the top performers. AAP MLAs -- excluding Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, other Ministers (2015), Speaker, Deputy Speaker and Delhi Cantt MLA Surinder Singh -- scored 58.44 per cent while the three BJP MLAs got 66.04 per cent. The ratings of the MLAs were based on data accessed through RTI and personal interviews with 29,950 citizens of Delhi conducted by a survey research organisation. They were rated on the basis of their performance in the Assembly and public perception during the period from February 24, 2015 to December 22, 2015. The Assembly met for 26 days during this period in which the 58 rated MLAs raised 951 issues. While in Mumbai, during the same time, its 31 rated MLAs raised 4,343 issues during 50 sittings. AAP MLAs raised 12 issues on average, while Mumbai's ruling BJP and Shiv Sena MLAs raised 69 issues on an average, it said. "While there were 1,50,885 complaints registered for water supply, there were only 33 issues raised by MLAs. There were 19,327 drainage-related complaints but it made it to the House only 5 times. "The cornerstone on which the new government was elected by the citizens of Delhi was clean politics, unfortunately, this is not being reflected in its 20 out of 58 MLAs ranked have criminal records...What our data is showing that AAP is not being different than the other mainstream parties," the report said.