Visitors hassled on chaotic first day at new Dera Bassi SDM office

The first day of official work at the Sub-Divisional Magistrate (SDM) office was carried out amid chaos, with the staff and visitors dealing with the impact of the recent move to Ambedkar Bhawan near Guru Harkrishan Public School.

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SDM Amit Gupta and the staff discharged duties from a makeshift arrangement with office record still packed in bundles, heaps of folders and even in trunk and almirahs lying in the verandah of the building for the past three days.

Sources privy to the developments said some of the records have been shifted to Mohali at the DAC, while recent records are at the new premises.

Visitors from Dera Bassi, Lalru, Handesra and several other villages might have to go to Mohali, around 40 km away, for their documentation.

At the new venue, the big hall is yet to be customised with partition walls and seating arrangement. With no set-up to maintain the records of the revenue department at Ambedkar Bhavan, documents stay stacked haphazardly in one room.

The premises is also yet to see civil, electrical maintenance work done and customised cabins according to the office needs. Uprooted aluminium doors and windows, meanwhile, make for an eyesore.

Visitors, who showed up in large numbers, were seen struggling to get their work done, often running from one corner to another in search of officials and office records.

Officials said the government had spent around Rs 1 crore to rennovate the tehsil complex around three years ago, but now after being ousted from there, they are back to square one.

The new office is considerably smaller in space than the last one. Washrooms and toilets have to be made and refurbished for public.

On December 20, the Punjab and Haryana High Court had directed SDM Dera Bassi to vacate his office on the first floor to make way for Judicial Officers to conduct their day-to-day trials at the tehsil complex. The court had also expressed displeasure that the way Punjab government was dealing with judicial infrastructure in the state.

It was apprised to the court that three judicial officers were functioning from the ramshackle second floor of the building while the first floor houses the SDM office.

The court futher ordered the government to vacate the first floor and renovate it along with the ground floor so that the functioning of all seven courts could be done in an effective way.