Mumbai : In what comes as good news for the BMC, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF) has informed the civic body that it need not take permissions from the ministry each time it wants to construct a new toilet in the city, if it falls in an eco-sensitive area of the coastal regulation zone.
The BMC had decided to construct 8,395 new pay-and-use toilet seats in the city and 1,36,307 new community toilet seats by 2019, to meet the deficiency of toilets in Mumbai. However, the civic body is facing space crunch in the city.
Mumbai barely has any open space that it can spare for new constructions and much of its land is government by Coastal Regulation Zone rules. This would have required the BMC to rush to the MOEF for fresh permissions for each new construction.
However, a senior BMC official associated with the project informed that the MoEF nullified his clause, making an exception for toilet construction as it’s a necessity. The civic body will now be able to construct toilets without facing bureaucratic hurdles regarding permissions.
