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| The beautifula Bhopsl Lake and its colourful skies |
It was a good augury yesterday to see the BJP patriarch of the state of
Madhya Pradesh and its former chief minister, Kailash Joshi, speak out against
the decision to build a smart city in the Shivajinagar and Tulsinagar areas. He
has unequivocally stated against the wisdom of building the smart city where
people are already living and where there is such a massive green cover. He has
said none ever consulted him but he feels there are enough open spaces in and
around the town where the smart city could be built and there is no need to
uproot people from their homes and cut down so many trees. This is nothing but
sheer logic and surprisingly it never occurred to any of the current top
politicians and bureaucrats who have been vigorously pushing the project. Joshi
confessed he did not know what precisely is a smart city.
With the Patriarch coming out against the government’s proposal there
seems to have been a domino effect as was discerned from the reports of today.
The local MP, Alok Sanjar, toed the Kailash Joshi line and several MLAs, some
of them influential and close to the chief minister, too have come out in the
open against the proposal. Obviously, they were also opposed to the proposal.
Since, however, the chief minister was pushing it strongly they maintained
their discipline and did not speak out against it. In his last statement the
chief minister was very firm about building the smart city in Shivajinagar and
Tulsinagar and seemed to indicate that he would brook no opposition.
Now, however, there seems to be
disarray and probably a bit of confusion in the Party ranks. One has to wait
and watch which way the thing turns. In face of the massive opposition from not
only his Party mentor and Party colleagues but also from the affected residents
he cannot be so unyielding. While the Citizen’s Forum had been suggesting the
Baan Ganga area, MP Alok Sanjar has queried why it should not be built in the
area of BHEL where houses have been vacated and are awaiting demolition. In any
case BHEL has a large amount of surplus land given away by the government and
lying unused. Someone else has suggested South TT Nagar where low-rise houses
were demolished and the land, prime one at that, is also lying unused.
In the meantime the Government of India has responded to Ms. Buch’s
missive and has asked the state government to reconsider the matter in detail.
Ms. Buch, former chief secretary, is now apparently heading the National Centre
for Human Settlement and Environment (NCHSE) which was formerly headed by her
husband Mahesh Buch until his sudden death. The current resistance to the MP
government’s proposal to build the smart city in an area which is likely to
disturb and perhaps ruin the environment of the entire city is well within the
domain of NCHSE. Ms. Buch spearheaded the peoples’ resistance and took off very
early writing to the government of India in January 2016. Others, including the
Bhopal Citizens’ Forum were tardy and the media campaign came much later.
Peoples Samchar has covered the whole proposal very well and field interviews
carried out by it were reflective of the affected residents’ sentiments against
it.
Now that the opposition to the proposal has built up the Mayor is
blaming the Congress for misleading the people. He is wrong as nobody has
misled the people; if any misleading has been done it was by the BJP government
and the municipal corporation headed by him. The other thing that one could
decipher from the fine print is that there is a move to blame the bureaucracy
for the faux pas. If the bureaucracy owns it up it would never be able to stand
up again against the political executive. The bureaucracy should have initially
come out against it as it meant unwarranted and uncalled for human misery for
the affected people as well as devastation of the environment of the city in
which they too reside. How could it be so insensitive to both of these
eventualities? One knows who are behind this harebrained proposal and one would
expect the bureaucracy to expose them.
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