Mumbai: The former principal secretary, Chief Minister’s Office (CMO), and the blue-eyed boy of CM Devendra Fadnavis, Praveen Pardeshi, took charge as the commissioner of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) commissioner on Monday. On his first day, he held a review meeting with all the additional municipal commissioners, engineers and officials to check the monsoon preparedness work carried out so far.
Pardeshi said, “In the city, there are 200 identified flooding spots, of which, work on 30 spots has been completed. The rest of the work will be carried out before monsoon. Also, the BMC disaster management officials will be given special powers so that they can take decisions on their own, even if the people of that particular flood-prone area are against it. All measures will be taken to prevent flooding.”
He said, “Currently, the BMC’s disaster control room is only useful for monitoring post-emergency situations. It should actually be able to provide early warning messages, so that BMC can help avert disaster, rather than react to it. A tie-up with the weather department will be made.”
He also took stock of other projects currently stuck in litigation —- the coastal road and the sewerage treatment plants, including those in Colaba and Malad. Further, he said he wanted to increase citizen participation in order to reduce conflicts with the corporation. “This will help improve civic amenities and bridge the gap of rising conflict of interest between environmentalists and developers.”
On the subject of nullah-cleaning, to ensure that work was carried out satisfactorily by the appointed contractor, the BMC would ask the latter to upload before and after work photographs, on the lines of the state-implemented ‘Jalyukt Shivar’. Pardeshi believes this will keep people informed about the work progress and they can lodge their complaints in a timely manner. Besides, photographic evidence will be useful to act against a contractor for shoddy work.
Addressing the contentious issue of potholes on the city’s roads, he said he was going to emphasise on the construction of proper stormwater drains and the laying out of utility lines on the side of roads, as opposed to the current layout, which goes through the middle of the roads.
“How will Mumbai’s roads be ever rid of potholes if there is constant digging of roads for the laying of cables each time in the middle of the road? Apart from filling the potholes, planning must be done to reduce the potholes caused by digging.
Also, a pothole-tracking method will be adopted wherein people can send a live image of a pothole and in 24 hours, BMC workers will fill the pothole,” promised Pardeshi. Finally, he spoke on the debt-ridden Brihanmumbai Electric Supply Transport (BEST), an undertaking of the BMC. He said wet-leasing and the operation of electric buses would help extricate BEST from debt.
