The Municipal Corporation of Delhi has directed officials to begin recruitment for 1,066 vacant public-health posts as dengue and malaria cases rise in the capital. The decision was taken by the civic body’s standing committee on Friday, October 30, with the committee warning that staff shortages could obstruct mosquito-control work.
The vacancies include 14 anti-malaria officers, 105 malaria inspectors, 398 assistant malaria inspectors and 549 multi-tasking staff. These field personnel are responsible for mosquito surveillance, checking breeding sites, anti-larval operations, fogging and public-awareness campaigns.
According to the MCD’s mosquito-borne disease report cited in the meeting, Delhi recorded 396 dengue cases and 94 malaria cases in October up to the time of the report. October’s dengue count has already exceeded the 377 cases recorded during the whole of October 2025. The cumulative cases reported in 2026 have crossed 993 for dengue and 337 for malaria.
Standing Committee chairperson Satya Sharma directed officials to start the recruitment process without delay. The committee said that if regular recruitment was likely to take time, the MCD could make appointments on a contractual or agreement basis. The decision comes as field-level staffing remains central to the civic body’s response to seasonal mosquito-borne diseases.
The committee also discussed sanitation, road repairs, shortages of sanitation workers and park maintenance. Sharma instructed zonal deputy commissioners to conduct surprise inspections of their offices and monitor staff attendance. She also directed officials to ensure that elected representatives do not have to repeatedly visit the MCD headquarters to resolve ward-level issues.
In another decision, the committee approved an upgrade of toll collection at 126 entry points into Delhi to a multi-lane free-flow system. The proposed system will use radio-frequency identification and automatic number-plate recognition to identify moving commercial vehicles and collect road tax and the environment compensation charge without requiring them to stop at barriers. The existing RFID-based collection system will continue during the transition.
The proposed tolling contract will run for six years, including six months for designing, developing and implementing the system and 54 months for operations and maintenance. A high-level committee has recommended an annual minimum reserve price of Rs 910 crore for road-tax collection. This will serve as the tender’s base price and is not a guaranteed revenue figure for the corporation, while environment compensation charge collection will depend on actual recovery.
The standing committee also approved a Rs 923.57-crore project to deploy 70 mechanical road-sweeping machines across MCD roads over 10 years. The project has been divided into three packages: Lion Services Limited will deploy 29 machines for Rs 369.53 crore, a consortium of GA Infra Private Limited and VN Engineering Company will provide 28 machines for Rs 368.83 crore, and JS Enviro Services Private Limited will deploy 13 machines for Rs 185.20 crore.
Officials said deployment of the 70 machines had been delayed. As a temporary measure, the MCD has begun the process of hiring 40 additional mechanical road-sweeping machines for four months. The civic body currently operates 66 such machines on about 1,400 kilometres of main roads wider than 60 feet. The committee is also expected to bring a proposal for rainwater-harvesting systems in all 250 wards, while directing that at least one park in every ward have such a system.
