Bandra residents are yet again unhappy with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the police’s management of the Mount Mary Fair this year.
Bandra residents are yet again unhappy with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the police’s management of the Mount Mary Fair this year. As per a high court order of October last year, the BMC was supposed to follow the same policy for stalls at Bandra fair as was applicable to Ganesh pandals during the recently concluded Ganesh festival.
While BMC officials said they drafted the Bandra fair policy based on the high court’s directives, Bandra residents claimed that the BMC did not manage to curb the menace of illegal stalls, leading to traffic mismanagement in the area during the week of the fair.
Bandra resident Lillian Pias, the original petitioner of the case against the BMC last year, said, “The policy drafted before the fair adhered to the court’s directives, even though I had suggested changes in the policy even then. However, improper implementation led to chaos during the week of the fair.”
Pias said that residents wanted the BMC to come up with a permanent policy for regulating stalls and commercial activity at the fair instead of drafting a new one every year.
She alleged that though the BMC had directed stalls at the fair to be set up only on one side of the roads around Mount Mary Church, the stalls popped up on both sides of the street and till about a week after the fair, continued to encroach the streets and footpaths.
“We had asked the BMC to keep up to 1metre area around fire hydrants free of stalls. However, some hydrants were crammed between stalls, and others even got enclosed inside the stalls. There was no way to access these hydrants in case of an accident,” she said. The only regulation the BMC managed to implement was the ban on cooking at stalls on the street. she added.
