Illegal parkings to be legalised

Your car was at a risk of being towed away even as you thought it was safely parked in an MCD-run parking lot. The fact is, there are more unauthorised parking lots in the city compared to legal ones.

Your car was at a risk of being towed away even as you thought it was safely parked in an MCD-run parking lot. The fact is, there are more unauthorised parking lots in the city compared to legal ones.

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The parking mafia had been operating these unauthorised parking lots for the past several years and fleecing people.

According to the MCD’s own admission, there are 166 unauthorised parking lots in the city compared to a mere 158 legal ones. These illegal parking lots have resulted in huge revenue losses to the MCD, which is already going through a huge financial crisis.

The Remunerative Project (RP) Cell of the MCD has finally compiled a list of the illegal parking lots and has decided to convert them into legal ones.

The civic agency has also circulated this list to all the MCD councillors, asking them to furnish the names of other illegal parking lots in their areas, if any.

“We have prepared the list of all the unauthorised parking lots that were being run illegally for the past many years. As these parking lots were illegal, there was no safety for the vehicles parked there. Also, we are losing revenue to the parking mafia operating them,” said a senior MCD official.

“We will send this list to the Delhi Traffic Police for a No Objection Certificate and then convert it into a legal parking lot,” said the official. “Moreover, we have got a number of complaints from people saying they were being overcharged by the contractors,” he added.

The city is already jostling for space with 900 vehicles being added to Delhi’s roads every day. There are a total of 65 lakh vehicles in the city and the civic agency is yet to complete the construction of any of its multi-level parking projects.