Manoj Kumar ParidaMANOJ KUMAR Parida, the newly appointed UT Adviser, may find Chandigarh quiet compared to his eventful postings in Delhi and Puducherry, but City Beautiful presents its own unique set of challenges for the administration.
Chandigarh, a city planned for 3.5 lakh people, now has over three times that number. More important, it has more vehicles than people. Parking space is woefully short. Public transport in the city is next to non-existent.
As residents struggle to find more space in the city, its heritage as India’s first modern planned city is increasingly a matter of contention, despite a hard-earned UNESCO World Heritage tag for the Capitol Complex.
Sukhna Lake, the city’s blue lungs, and its water levels are a perennial concern. Despite appearing to be one of India’s cleaner cities, Chandigarh’s solid waste management system is broke from the bottom up.
The city has proved incapable of generating enough revenue to sustain itself. Its politicians are locked in a constant struggle with the administration for more say in how Chandigarh is run. Parida will have his plate full negotiating his way through all this.
The Punjab & Haryana High Court, which has been watching the UT Administration like a hawk, and pulled it up on several occasions, has asked for a comprehensive parking policy for the city. The administration had made a draft parking policy to promote the use of non-motorised transport but had to junk it after different stakeholders, including residents’ welfare associations and political representatives, strongly opposed it. The previous draft policy was made on the Singapore pattern of taxing road users heavily on the purchase of vehicles costing over Rs 10 lakh, and making a parking certificate mandatory. The RWAs and political representatives opposed it on the grounds that public transport in the city was not good enough for such a policy.
Parimal Rai had started working on the new “Chandigarh-specific” parking policy. However, the fate of that now lies in the hands of his successor. Chairman of the Federation of Sectors Welfare associations of Chandigarh Baljinder Singh Bittu said, “We hope from the new Adviser that he gets in those ideas in the parking policy which are acceptable to all. He should know what problems the residents face. If harsh restrictions on use of personal vehicles are to be imposed, then he must understand the state of public transport too. There is no end-to-end connectivity.”
The ring road which is to be constructed around the city so that the vehicles from Punjab and Haryana need not enter Chandigarh to get to their destinations has also been pending for the last one year. If implemented, it will prevent 1.5 lakh interstate vehicles daily from entering the city. For the project, talks with the Punjab and Haryana governments were already on but nothing has been finalised yet.
It is not easy to execute projects proposed in Chandigarh because all the proposals have to be screened to ensure they do not fail the Corbusier test. “Since Municipal Corporation manages most of the key issues like encroachments, parking and water, we hope that there is better coordination between the MC and administration under the new adviser,” Mayor Davesh Moudgil said. Maintaining balance in relations with the factions in the BJP, which controls the Chandigarh Corporation, is another key challenge for Parida.
