Mumbai : Just a day after the Anant Chaturdashi, when Mumbaikars immersed Ganesh idols marking an end to the ten day long Ganesh festival, the BMC has come down heavily on mandals who failed to toe the line of guidance during the festival. Within a single day, the BMC sent notices to around 350 Ganesh mandals which had constructed their pandals without the requisite permissions from the civic body and the traffic police.
The BMC is still in the process of identifying all mandals and hence it is unable to anticipate how many more are there. Presently the BMC has sent out notices informing the mandals that action will be taken against their illegal pandals. This is in accordance with the high court’s orders where it asked BMC not to grant permissions to intrusive Ganesh pandals and take severe action against illegal ones. The BMC has not specified punitive action in the notices. BMC’s spokesperson said, “The high court will decide
on the fine or other punitive action. The BMC’s responsibility was to identify the pandals and our work is on.” One day before the festival was to start, the civic body had received 2126 pandal applications of which it had approved 976 and rejected 473. the remaining 709 applications were pending due to technical difficulties.
