Vehicles parked at the MCC office on Wednesday. (Sahil Walia)
MUNICIPAL CORPORATION employees will no longer have to come to work on a bicycle every Wednesday as the ‘cycle to work’ order stands suspended temporarily. New MC Commissioner KK Yadav told officials at a meeting on Tuesday evening that because of the extreme weather, it would not be mandatory to come on bicycle to office and the practice would be revived once the weather was okay.
On Wednesday, the Municipal Corporation building at Sector 17 was packed with vehicles that were even banned from entering this day. Most of the employees came on two-wheelers and four-wheelers. The then MC Commissioner Jitender Yadav, who relinquished charge last week, had made it mandatory for every employee to come to the MC office by cycle or public transport.
Also, no councillor, who had to come to the MC office on Wednesday, was allowed to even park his car at the MC office. After two to three weeks of introducing this order, even otherwise, the cycle-to-work practice had begun to fizzle out. Only senior officials would come on cycle while other staff would park their vehicles at a distance and then walk to the MC office or use public transport to report for duty. On Wednesday, officers, who would use bicycles to come on Wednesdays, too, used their government vehicles.
Talking to Chandigarh Newsline, K K Yadav said, “Once the weather gets fine, we will revive this practice. In fact, the officials asked me at the meeting whether they need to follow this rule. So, I told them that it won’t be mandatory from my side and if anyone wants to use a bicycle, he can. Since I don’t want any of our employees to fall sick during these extreme hot conditions, we will revive this practice after some time.”
Then MC Commissioner Jitender Yadav told Newsline that even he has now been given charge of other departments and does not serve the MC anymore, he would pedal his way to office. Yadav is now the Managing Director of CITCO apart from departments of sports, rural development and panchayats, animal husbandry and fisheries, printing and stationery, statistics and UT Secretariat Establishment.
“I will continue to go to my office – UT Secretariat – on bicycle every Wednesday,” said the former commissioner.
During Jitender Yadav’s term, some officials, on the first day, had put forth the point that because of summer, it would be difficult to use a cycle to reach office. To that, the then commissioner had stated that “body required some Vitamin D also and moreover at 9 am and 5 pm, it wasn’t that sunny”.