Shinde watches over city from BMC control room

Mumbai Chief Minister Eknath Shinde takes charge of the city's administration during heavy rainfall, focusing on addressing waterlogging and transportation issues. He aims to ensure the ruling Shiv Sena-BJP alliance wins the upcoming civic polls.

Strap: This was CM’s second effort to reach out to public year, after he scrutinized storm water drains in May

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MUMBAI: Given that civic polls are likely to be held a few months after the monsoon season, chief minister Eknath Shinde is letting no opportunity go by to play the people’s leader. In the midst of Wednesday’s heavy downpour, Shinde decided to scrutinize how well-oiled the administration was as it tried to keep the city from becoming paralysed. With this outreach, in many ways, he had slipped into the shoes of the municipal commissioner for a few hours.

Having started his political career as a corporator at Thane Municipal Corporation, Shinde is abreast of niggling civic issues. Twice in May this year, the chief minister supervised the cleaning of storm water drains; he followed it up with spot visits after the first monsoon showers in June led to waterlogging in several parts of the city.

Late Wednesday afternoon, as Mumbaikars were busy wrapping up their day to head home amidst reports of disruption of Central Railway (CR) services, Shinde reached the disaster control room of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) at around 4:25pm, where civic officials briefed him about the situation in the city.

Officials in chief minister’s secretariat said Shinde had been seeking feedback on the rains and the city’s functioning since morning. Late afternoon, the CM went to speaker Rahul Narwekar’s chamber where deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis was also present, and a collective decision was taken to allow all government and semi-government employees to leave their offices. At Mantralaya, Shinde said he had directed chief secretary Manoj Saunik, all divisional commissioners and collectors to shift people to safe areas.

When he learnt that the evening would be a rough deal for commuters on the CR line, as a result of heavy water-logging in areas beyond Kalyan after the previous night’s downpour, Shinde told the civic administration to turn to the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking to deploy extra buses so that people crowding stations could have a second option. Additionally, the administration was asked to arrange tea, water and dry snacks for those stranded outside for a long span. Soon after, officials at BMC

distributed tea and biscuits at CST, Byculla, Dadar, Bhandup and other local stations.

When it was in power, the erstwhile Shiv Sena wielded much influence on BMC. Shinde has a similar objective and wants to ensure that the ruling Shiv Sena-BJP alliance wins the Mumbai civic polls. In this quest, he will face Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray, who is working equally hard to gain control of the civic body and revive his party.

In this backdrop, it is no surprise that Shinde has been taking an interest in the running of the civic administration, which is helmed by municipal commissioner I S Chahal. Over the last few months, Shinde held multiple meetings with Chahal to ensure monsoon preparedness of the city, and inspected pre-monsoon cleaning works at several parts. His purpose was to ensure that complaints of waterlogging and bad roads are significantly reduced this season.

So, on Wednesday when Chahal, who was in Chembur on a scheduled visit to inspect landslide prone areas, asked Shinde if he should cut his visit short and meet him at the headquarters, Shinde told him he would take over and that the civic commissioner should go about his task as planned.

“The situation is under control. I have put the administration on alert,” Shinde declared after his visit to the BMC control room. Shinde had also visited the BMC control room last year after he took over as chief minister, as it had rained hard in the first week of July 2022.