Aaditya Thackeray bats for Patwardhan Park

Bandra residents’ protest against the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) plan to construct a multilevel parking lot under Raosaheb Patwardhan Park on Linking Road got a political hue on Sunday after Shiv Sena (UBT) legislator Aaditya Thackeray joined them in solidarity

Mumbai: Bandra residents’ protest against the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) plan to construct a multilevel parking lot under Raosaheb Patwardhan Park on Linking Road got a political hue on Sunday after Shiv Sena (UBT) legislator Aaditya Thackeray joined them in solidarity.

Aaditya Thackeray bats for Patwardhan Park

Thackeray also played a friendly cricket match along with the locals to lend his support to their movement to save the park.

The resident also gifted a t-shirt with the slogan “Parks Are Not For Parking” to the Sena (UBT) leader.

Thackeray tweeted, “Visited Patwardhan Park to support the local citizens standing up for it. While the BMC proposed an underground car park, RTI revealed that there is also a plan for a 10-storey car park building. All this for 150 car park slots underground, while more than 400 parking lots remain unused around the park. One wonders for which contractor is the BMC destroying the park?”

While the matter is in the Bombay high court after a PIL was filed last week, the friendly cricket match was held to drive the point home that the playground/recreation ground was being utilised for various sporting activities by children and not a barren land as claimed by the civic body.

Joining residents were also veteran activists from NAGAR, an NGO fighting to preserve and protect open spaces in the city.

They have written a letter to the civic body that visually they shall see a pleasing green space, this will be a mirage at best because there will be no possibility of the concrete base of the open space allowing the monsoon water to reach down to the water table.

The letter signed by Nayan Kathpalia, Vidya Vaidya and Bindu Tandon stated that while the city is in dire need of parking facilities, not only for private vehicles but also for commercial vehicles parked randomly all-over Greater Mumbai, especially in the suburbs, these facilities must not be built under the meagre open spaces available for everyone in the city.

The veteran activists have opined that ponds and small lakes have already been destroyed, waterways have been converted into dirty nallahs and the city now just has a fraction of the mandatory open spaces left to allow rainwater down the water table.

“We cannot and must not let this last remaining natural system in Mumbai be damaged or lost too. No open space should have an unnatural, blocked impermeable concrete base which will obstruct rainwater from percolating down to the existing water table,” the activists said.

The letter stated that these are our natural sponges and our best defence to mitigate flooding. “All new constructions and buildings have these unnatural concrete grounds around them with no possibilities of replenishing the water table, spare at least the open spaces from suffering the same fate,” the letter read.

The arguments for and against the necessity of car parks, the types of car parks, mechanised or podium based, providing visually appealing parks, play area grounds above an underground car park, are of little consequence in the face of an open space having concrete floors with no connection to mother earth, they opined.

“We hope through this letter that you will intervene and build the necessary underground parking space in areas already concretised or under a facility/building that will be constructed soon,” the letter concluded.

When contacted, a BMC official said that the civic body was constructing the underground car parking under an undeveloped recreation ground/playground.