Plans for parking lot under Patwardhan Park shelved

Mumbai: A day after Bandra West MLA Ashish Shelar said that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) would scrap its plan to construct a parking lot below the Raosaheb Patwardhan Park, BMC officials confirmed that the plan had been shelved months ago.
“We put the tender in abeyance in November or December 2023,” said an official from the BMC’s traffic department. “The plan was shelved due to opposition from local residents and representatives,” he said, adding that the park would be beautified instead.
The gardens department of H West ward – spread across Bandra, Khar and Santacruz West – also confirmed that they are considering beautifying the part of Raosaheb Patwardhan Park under which the parking lot was to be built. Currently, there is a playground in the area for which no entry fee is levied.
“The park is well maintained, but we are looking into what can be done at the playground. Perhaps some sporting facilities can be built there, so we are talking to the architecture department,” said an official.
The plan for building a parking lot under the park was first floated in 2018, said residents. The plan then was for a terrace garden over a parking lot; a hawker’s bazaar was also planned in one corner of the basement. But that plan was scrapped, they said.
In March 2023, BMC floated a fresh ₹74-crore tender for building a multilevel, mechanised underground car park on the northside of Bal Gandharva Rangmandir at Patwardhan Park.
The parking lot was initially supposed to accommodate 228 vehicles, but it was modified to accommodate 190 vehicles on two floors in the basement following opposition from locals.
Zoru Bhathena, who was at the forefront of protests by locals, said he had last been updated on the issue in June 2023, when the writ petition he and others had filed in the Bombay high court was heard for the first and only time. “After an RTI revealed more details, we asked to rectify the petition. But the court has not heard it since. The BMC too was only extending the tender and not acting on it, so we did not push the petition,” he said.
Bathena welcomed the shelving of the parking lot, saying it would’ve disrupted the open space. “The playground is located in one corner of the park and is used by many poor citizens. The rest of the park is well-maintained, so it is a silly idea to have a parking lot under it,” he said. “Besides, there are 700-800 parking spaces lying unused in the vicinity at Linking Road.”