Close on the heels of the Mumbai Coastal Road being named after Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, demands have been made requesting names for the two other key infrastructure projects in the city.
Fadnavis shares old letter
Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday shared an old letter on the Twitter, requesting Chief Minister Eknath Shinde to name Versova-Bandra sea link on the Mumbai coastal road after SwatantryaVeer Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link between Sewri and Nhava-Sheva in Navi Mumbai after former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpeyee.
CM Shinde announced to name coastal road after Sambhaji Maharaj
Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, while speaking at the 366th birth anniversary programme to commemorate the birth anniversary of Chhatratapati Sambhaji Maharaj at the Gateway of India, announced that the Mumbai coastal road, which will prove to be the lifeline of Mumbai once completed, will be named Swarajya Rakshak Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj Marg. He also said that a grand statue of Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj would be erected at a suitable point along the coastal road.
History of road-naming in Maharashtra
Naming of roads in Maharashtra, over the past 20-odd years, appears to have been linked to expression of gratitude and symbolic expression of their power by different political groups. The Mumbai-Pune Expressway was planned when the BJP-Shiv Sena government was in power in the state and the then government appeared comfortable with the suggestion that the road be named after famous Marathi writer PL Deshpande. However, in 1999 the BJP-Shiv Sena government went out of power and under the new government, the MSRDC department, which built the road, went to the NCP. The party decided to name the road after YB Chavan. When it came to naming the Bandra-Worli sea link, the party named it after former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi while setting aside a suggestion to name it after Shiv Sena's Balasaheb Thackeray.
Relatively less controversial was the naming of the Ghatkopar-Mankhurd Link Road (GMLR) and the Eastern Freeway in Mumbai after Jeejabai Bhosle and former Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, respectively. Both the roads were built by the MMRDA during the tenure of Congress chief ministers.
Samruddhi expressway was planned to be named after Vajpayee
However, this wasn't the story with the Nagpur-Mumbai Samruddhi corridor. It was planned during the BJP government under Devendra Fadnavis, when the party had said that it would be named after former M Atal Bihari Vajpeyee as a mark of respect for the PM who had conceived the idea of golden quadrilateral highway project to boost the development of the country. However, when Uddhav Thackeray became the chief minister in 2019, he named the corridor after his father Balasaheb Thackeray.
