Acute shortage of gardeners to maintain Delhi's 15,200 parks

Hari Lal is one of five gardeners entrusted to oversee the maintenance of 72 parks at Patel Nagar. In his team, two people maintain parks in residential neighbourhoods-called housing area parks -and their duties include removing garbage, watering the plants, and trimming the grass. They also prune trees along colony roads, and remove fallen trees after stormy weather.

- Paras Singh

Ankush Narang, the councillor of Patel Nagar ward, said even if two people spend a day to clean and spruce up one colony park, it would take more than a month - 36 days to be exact to return to the same park.

"There is an acute shortage of gardeners to tend to green spaces. We have only five gardeners for a massive area, and many of them are on the verge of retirement. This translates to garbage accumulating for several months, which means that we don't allow our children to spend time in parks. Our area suffers from the same problem as no fresh recruitments have been made," said Narang, from the Aam Aadmi Party, who put up a short notice question before the house of councillors to flag the crisis on August 31.

An acute shortage of gardeners is a problem that plagues the entire city.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi's horticulture department maintains 15,226 city parks, spread over an area of 5172.07 acres. Around 90% of these green spaces are categorised as housing area parks, and they not only act as breathing space for the Capital's residents, but also provide exercise and recreational space.

However, MCD data reveals that more than 50% of the sanctioned posts for gardeners are currently lying vacant - there are 7,872 sanctioned posts, of which only 3,446 are currently occupied. The data also reveals that of MCD's 12 zones, some are worse off than the others..