Delhi Revdi

As the race for the 2025 Delhi Assembly elections heats up, voters and political analysts agree that this will be AAP’s toughest contest yet

- Avantika Mehta

E VERY day, Geeta Sharma uses her pink ticket to board bus number 623 from her Kotla-Mubarakpur home to Vasant Vihar, a distance of about nine kms, where she cleans houses from 7 AM to 2 PM. On her way back, she stops at Lajpat Nagar and Defence Colony for the second leg of her day, cleaning lawyers' offices. Free travel across Delhi has been a game-changer, allowing her to double her income from Rs 18,000 to Rs 36,000 without added input costs.

"My friend always told me she could get me work in Vasant Vihar, but it was so far that travelling alone would take too much time and cost too much money every day. Now, I can use the bus for free. And the buses are nicer and cleaner, so there is some sense of ease in my home," says the single mother of three. She earns Rs 9,000 per home, most of it in cash. She attributes the Rs 20,000 she has in savings to welfare schemes by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). She also recalls the first time she received Rs 1,000 from the AAP government's Mahila Samman Yojana scheme.

"That money, the Rs 1,000, helped me feed my children properly, helped me buy a gas cylinder and some new clothes for them for school. It was the difference between us begging our neighbours for scraps and us holding our head high," she says.

But when the water crisis hit Delhi in September, just before the Diwali season, Geeta wondered if the AAP government in the national capital was too busy with "scams and sheesh mahals (glass palaces)" to do right by her and the city's 33 million residents. Even now, a week before the elections, Geeta says she doesn't know who to vote for.

She asks a question that has echoed in many voters' minds in Delhi. "AAP has done work. We can see it. But they are always fighting with the BJP and I am scared that they will be too busy fighting for the next five years, so when will they have time to govern?" she wonders.