According to sources in the Delhi government, a file allowing Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to travel to Singapore to attend the World Cities Summit has not yet been approved by the office of Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena. August 2–3 are the summit’s scheduled dates.
Due to a lack of administrative expertise, a number of paperwork have been sitting with the LG for several days. Even papers pertaining to minor issues are stalled. The CM’s travel request to Singapore to attend the World Cities Summit is one of them. According to a source, the file has been delayed for three weeks.
On June 2, Kejriwal said that Simon Wong, the Singapore High Commissioner, had invited him and that he had accepted the invitation. According to sources, Saxena received the file on June 7.
Kejriwal’s participation in an international summit has already made headlines. He had applied to attend the Copenhagen C40 World Mayors’ Summit in Denmark in 2019, but the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had rejected his request.
The MEA stated in a statement that the Chief Minister of the NCT of Delhi’s involvement “was not commensurate with the level of engagement from other countries” in a panel discussion. A West Bengal minister was planning to participate, according to then-Union minister Prakash Javadekar, who called it a “mayor-level gathering.”
Sheila Dikshit, a former chief minister of Delhi, had gone to the same gathering in New York in 2007. Later, Kejriwal gave a video conference address at the summit.
