Will your car stay inside or outside the building? A BMC lottery will decide

You may soon have to give up your multiple parking slots inside your building, once the civic body implements its revised parking policy in Mumbai.

You may soon have to give up your multiple parking slots inside your building, once the civic body implements its revised parking policy in Mumbai.

Car-parking

According to the policy, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will provide residential parking permits. Each family in every society will get space for only one car. For people who want to park more than one car, the BMC will conduct a lottery to allot parking spaces on roads, on rotational basis, as per the availability of space. The others will have to park in the nearest authorised parking lots in the area.

In the space-starved city, builders for years have been ‘selling’ parking space inside the buildings, even though they are not supposed to charge for the same. As a result, a single family can have multiple parking spaces inside a building, forcing others to park on the road outside.

“The BMC needs to conduct a survey in each building to see if parking is being done as per the parking statement submitted by the builder to the building proposal department at the time of taking approval for construction. In my building, a single family has three parking spaces inside the building,” said Afzal Mohammed, RTI activist. Civic officials agree that the implementation of the policy will give rise to a clamour for space on the roads. Residents who will soon have to pay for parking space which till now has been free, have criticised the policy.

From February, the BMC will implement the residential permit system in A ward as a pilot project, for a duration of three months, and will later make requisite changes, based on the feedback. “The idea behind policy is to encourage people to use public transport and discourage purchase of vehicles. To implement the policy, BMC staff will collect fines and charges. Soon we will have a web-based parking system in place, which will make the method transparent,” said SVR Srinivas, additional municipal commissioner.