Mumbai : Mumbai’s favorite festival ended on a sweet note with the city not reporting any casulaties during Ganesh Visarjan. While 18 people suffered minor injuries due to sting ray fishes, one was admitted in a private hospital for the same.
As citizens bid a teary-eyed goodbye to their beloved Bappa, Mumbai came to a standstill, with traffic being diverted from the Visarjan paths, schools, shops, offices shut and citizens coming out in large numbers to participate in the revelry.
According to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, 45,458 Ganesh idols were immersed in the city on the last day of Visarjan, of which 37,227 were household Ganesh idols, 173 were Gauri idols and 8058 were saarvajanik or public Ganesh idols. 1800 of the total immersions happened in artificial lakes.
BMC had deployed 404 lifeguards, 67 primary healthcare centers, 55 ambulances and 278 CCTV cameras for effective management. In a first, it had also arranged for 77 mobile toilets considering the increasing number of devotees. Although the BMC claims to have filled 424 out of 442 potholes on the Visarjan paths, Naresh Dahibavkar, President of the Ganesh Utsav Samanvay Samiti, slammed it for potholes that still existed.
Citing seven cases where Ganesh idols were damaged due to potholes on the roads, Dahibavkar said, “All our mandals had to carry steel plates and gunny sacks in order to pad-up the potholes before the trolley carrying the idols passed over them. So it is ultimately the mandals who had to fend for themselves,” he said.
