Urban News

Hindustan Times  13.12.2010

None of the beautification projects planned for seven gardens in the city in this year’s budget have taken off. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had budgeted Rs 18 crore for these garden beautification and development projects for the year 2010-2011. Civic officials said the reason for the delay is that this time the gardens department issued tenders for the project. Until now, the planning and designing department would issue the tenders.

“Since the gardens department didn’t have experience there were some errors in the tenders so they need to re-tender the projects,” a senior civic official said, requesting anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media.

With the civic elections in 2012, corporators are not too happy with the BMC’s slack attitude. In an internal review meeting held on these beautification projects, members of the civic standing committee were told that due to delays in finalising the designs and other elements of the plan, no project for which budgetary provisions were made has taken off.

Additional municipal commissioner Aseem Gupta said that they will not let the budgetary allocation for the project lapse and will issue the tenders by the end of this month.

Corporators in the standing committee said there are many gardens in the city that the BMC has spent money to beautify but due to neglect from contractors these gardens wear a barren look. Officials said the civic body does not have the money to maintain these gardens and that they are not sure whether the garden department will get additional money during the budget revision. “We are not sure whether we will get money for maintaining these gardens because we don’t know which head to withdraw money from,” the official said.

Shiv Sena corporator Yeshwant Jadhav said: “Contractors, who are awarded the job, are supposed to maintain these gardens and provide security but they don’t do it.” Corporators added that in a bid to beautify the garden, the contractor ends up constructing concrete structures on a major part of the garden and neglects the green space.