NDMC wipes Jantar Mantar clean after 36-day CJP protest

By Sunday morning the slogans were gone. Yellow police barricades still lined the stretch, but the graffiti that had covered walls through five weeks of student protest had been painted over, and the trash piles on footpaths had vanished.

Hours after the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) called off its month-long sit-in at Jantar Mantar on Saturday night — following Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation — the New Delhi Municipal Council opened a night-long restoration drive, the Indian Express reported from the site.

What we can verify

Dr Ankita Rai, NDMC Chief Medical Officer, told the Express that 70 sanitation workers were on the ground from 10 pm Saturday to 5 am Sunday, with 35 more deployed later. She put waste cleared at about 40 tonnes overnight and 20 tonnes Sunday morning.

“At midnight, we deployed an earthmover to remove the residual waste near the stage area and near Kerala House, which was not accessible to us when the protests were going on. We wet-cleaned the area throughout to remove the smell which usually arises when the area is enclosed for so long,” Rai said, per the Express.

NDMC officials said the fleet also included eight auto-tippers, two heavy trucks and three high-pressure jetting machines. Vice-chairperson Kuljeet Singh Chahal stayed through the night supervising cleaning, waste removal, repair and restoration.

Chahal said the Health & Sanitation, Civil Engineering and Horticulture departments worked together, and that more than 500 officers and employees took part from Saturday night into Sunday — cleaning, washing and restoring roads, footpaths, central verges, green belts, walls and other public spaces. Rai said the push covered Jantar Mantar, Tolstoy Road, Sansad Marg, Jai Singh Road, Janpath and nearby Connaught Place stretches so the area could reopen to tourists and residents quickly.

Several protesters stayed after the official wind-down and helped bag litter. Tushar Mehra, 26, who said he had spent more than 15 days at the site, told the Express: “Cleaning up the mess that we’ve created is our responsibility.”

Indian Express video from the same day shows the emptied roads and barricades a day after the crowd dispersed, matching the civic-agency account of a cleared site.

What remains unverified

Independent tonnage counts beyond NDMC figures quoted by the Express were not located at the time of writing. Headcount of remaining volunteers after midnight was not given as an official tally.

The overnight NDMC operation is separate from the smaller volunteer human-chain clean-up outside Gate 2 reported earlier the same night; both happened after CJP ended the sit-in, but only NDMC has published equipment and tonnage numbers through the Express.