NEW DELHI: With senior Delhi Congress leaders away in Hyderabad attending the party's plenary, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is going slow with its ongoing demolition drive across the Capital. While the status report on illegal constructions carried out by prominent political leaders is still being prepared, the civic body is yet to target unauthorised properties of those who are in ``power and authority" as directed by the Delhi High Court.

As the top MCD leaders including Mayor Satbir Singh and Standing Committee Chairman Mukesh Goel along with Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and Congress' Delhi unit head Ram Babu Sharma are not in the Capital, the MCD administration wants to play it "safe" and is busy planning "future strategies" to tackle the problem of unauthorised constructions.

As a result, the past few days has seen a slowing down of the demolition exercise in the city with only one to two properties being targeted in each zone.

The MCD administration is also under pressure from its engineers who are threatening to "expose" illegal and unauthorised constructions of political leaders and other influential people if they are made scapegoats and penalised for the present mess.

It is learnt that the senior MCD officials have brokered peace with the agitated engineers assuring them no major action would be initiated against them.

With resentment brewing among residents across the Capital, MCD officials are in a fix on how to implement the court orders. On the one hand people are agitating that the MCD was still not targeting the "big fish" as ordered by the court, on the other resentment is brewing in around 140-odd villages that fall under Lal Dora area as they fear large-scale action in their localities after the recent court order.

Residents of these villages will be organising a mahapanchayat on January 29 to draw up an action plan to resist "highhandedness" of the civic body.

Moreover, people are also angry with the MCD for its failure to penalise the powerful builder lobby that is one of the main culprits behind large-scale unauthorised constructions.

They have sold their properties to unsuspecting residents who are now facing the brunt of the demolition drive.

A large number of such hapless residents are visiting the MCD headquarters at Town Hall and the Municipal Commissioner's office with their complaints about builders who had sold them flats or shops.

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