Seamless travel in Mumbai a reality soon

With the intention of making travel easy in Mumbai and the extended suburbs, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said that he had a plan to make mobility “seamless”. As per the plan, the time taken to travel between any two points in Mumbai should not be more than one hour. This plan was revealed on Monday during a discussion at the Make in Mumbai session.

Mr Fadnavis said, “A comprehensive mobility plan is being made for seamless travel in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. This will include buses, monorails, the metro rail, bridges and roads.”

The plan was prepared in 2008, but was in cold storage for all these years. The BJP-led government has decided to revive it and he BMC has prepared the plan to be submitted to the MMRDA.

“The idea is that travelling in the MMR should not take more than one hour,” MMRDA commissioner U.P.S. Madan later said. Also, the government is trying not to have slums around government establishments to avoid any threat. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray also attended the session.

The CM, chief secretary Swadhin Kshatriya, BMC commissioner Ajoy Mehta, dignitaries Cisco president Dinesh Malkani, and YES Bank co-founder and managing director Rana Kapoor participated in the discussion on the development of Mumbai. They talked about the financial potential of the city, discussed the security aspect and the possibility of having an international financial centre in the city.

The CM spoke of ‘build in Mumbai’ as a new slogan for affordable housing. “Our next aim is to have affordable housing in Mumbai, “build in Mumbai”. Fifty per cent of our population stays in slums and we want them to have affordable houses,” he said.

Additional home secretary, K.P. Bakshi talked about security of the city and said that they would soon have a scheme to protect government establishments from slums. “We are planning to give permanent security to the government establishments against slums for security reasons,” Mr Bakshi said.