Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (File)Sources in the Delhi government said Friday that the office of the Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena has not yet cleared a file that would allow Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to go to Singapore to attend the World Cities Summit. The summit is scheduled for August 2-3.
“Several files have been stuck with the LG for many days because of a lack of administrative experience. Even files related to small matters are stuck. Among these is the file for the CM to go to Singapore to attend the World Cities Summit. That file has been pending for three weeks,” a source said.
Kejriwal had said on June 2 that High Commissioner of Singapore Simon Wong had invited him and he had accepted the invitation. Sources said that the file was sent to Saxena on June 7.
This is not the first time that Kejriwal’s attendance at an international summit has been in the news. In 2019, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had denied him permission to attend the Copenhagen C40 World Mayors’ Summit in Denmark.
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In a statement, the MEA had said the “participation of Chief Minister of NCT of Delhi as a Speaker at a panel discussion was not commensurate with the level of participation from other countries”. Then Union minister Prakash Javadekar had said it was a “mayor-level conference” and a West Bengal minister was going to attend it.
Former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit had attended the same summit in 2007 in New York. Kejriwal later addressed the summit via video-conferencing.
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