Times of India: Mumbai: Friday,
October 07, 2016.
The draft
Development Plan (DP) 2034 released this May has received around 84,000
suggestions and objections, and not around 13,000 as the BMC has claimed, an
RTI query has revealed. By comparison, the BMC had got fewer responses at
64,867 in 2015, when the draft DP was first published and was sent back to the
drawing board for revision.
This data was
obtained by the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) under the Right to
Information (RTI) Act, where it scrutinized the BMC's inward register and
claimed to have found multiple letters, which were all uniquely signed with
same or similar content. The BMC, though, clubbed all similar letters together
and made single entries.
The UDRI took
into consideration all these multiplesletters as individual ones and found that
around 84,000 responses had been received.
Pankaj Joshi,
executive director of UDRI, said clubbing of signatures only served to
artifically reduce the number of responses the BMC had received to the plan.
"It is evident from the above data that the current draft DP 2034 is also
riddled with errors and is certainly incomplete in nature. However, to ease
media pressure and undermine public outcry, the BMC chose to artificially
reduce the suggestions and objections to the plan. Considering the volume of
responses that the BMC has actually received, it is evident that this plan,
too, is riddled with errors and is certainly incomplete in nature," said
Joshi.
Rais Shaikh,
Samajwadi Party leader in the BMC, said he had raised the issue of clubbing of
suggestions and objections in the BMC standing committee meeting as well. He
said, "The BMC does not have the liberty to club the suggestions and
objections as per law and we have, from the beginning, dismissed this idea. The
ruling party in the BMC has converted the entire DP draft process into a mere
formality."
Municipal
commissioner Ajoy Mehta, though, said the civic body does not want to get into
the numbers game. "In several cases, we found that the suggestions and
objections received in one case were similar to a few hundred more submitted by
the same group. Therefore, the multiple entries were counted as one. It is
important to ensure that every party is given a hearing, which would be
done," said Mehta.
The draft DP
2034 has been published for the second time after a large controversy broke out
last year when the plan was published for the first time. This was after Chief
Minister Devendra Fadnavis, in April 2015, asked the civic body to revise the
plan. So far, the Maharashtra state director of town planning has appointed
three experts on the BMC's draft republished Development Plan (DP) 2034
planning committee, and three other members from the civic standing committee
are expected to be announced soon.
.JPG)
.JPG)
