Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Movement Marathi Manoos - A Mislead Movement

When the midnight struck today, I happen to receive an email forward that turned out to be a nicely drafted mail / letter to a Common Shiv Sainik from Mumbai / Maharashtra. The letter went from highlighting the way the Marathi Manoos concept has been mistreated by Shiv Sena to the level of misleading the sentiments of a common Maharashtrian. Salute to the author who wrote such a thought provoking letter. Hope it reaches the expected destination and brings some sanity in the minds where required.

The letter certainly made me think on the front of the plight of Mumbai in Particular. The plight of Mumbai is not just the North Indians, but the heavy influx of migrants from across India. This influx is coupled because of the Lack of Space, Infrastructure and availability of the Basic facilities for the Common Man. We do see a lot of development happening off late, but again not as good as other cities. Certainly it is for the lack of political focus and lack of responsibility towards own city. I would like to see the movement “Marathi Manoos” turning to betterment of Mumbai, we need to make a movement “Aamchi Mumbai” to particularly focus towards upliftment of the living standards in Mumbai. The “Aamchi Mumbai movement needs to address following concerns -

  1. The political influence of certain builder lobby has grown so big that when the state govt seeks sanctions for development of Mumbai’s Infrastructure the Central Govt. seeks cut down on Urban Land Ceiling Act and giving more land to builders. Mangroves are being reclaimed and the wildlife that used to thrive on these is getting extinct. We need to work on this side.
  2. Encroachment of public land is another problem that needs to be addressed. Such encroachments lead to occupancy by migrants on lands earmarked for parks or may be parking or say something similar. Off recently I heard that one such piece of land was given to the builder to develop residential space in place of the hutments and also some real expensive apartments will be constructed there. That means the builder will use say around 30% of land to build residential complex for the hutment dwellers, 50% land for the apartments and rest 20% will be open space for park or something like that. However the original plan for the community park at that land went to I guess waste basket and the BMC officials seems to have got paid for throwing away the original plan. This is just one off case, there are many such cases.
  3. Growing number of Footpath / Traffic Signal Hawkers, leading chaos on traffic signal and at times turning nightmare for the drivers. The Occupancy of Footpath by these illegal sellers forces pedestrians on roads and thus creates a traffic hazard.
  4. Illegal Migrants from other countries obtain fake Ration Cards and other required papers to be the citizens of Mumbai and thus Citizens of India. In certain cases it is the influence of Shiv Sena leaders that works in favor of these illegal migrants (Cases have been recorded in Chembur and allied areas in Mumbai)

These are some of the major things that hit my mind at this hr of the night. There are many other areas that I am sure need more focus from the Mumbiites. I guess if Shiv Sena would focus on the constructive way for development of Mumbai, it would be in much better a situation rather than the current way its dealing with and projecting the issues as.

The high influx of people to Mumbai must be checked and that is for sure as otherwise there would be no space left in Mumbai to even drive a cycle. But we surely don’t need a destructive way to fall in pits and lose the shine of “Aamchi Mumbai”.

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