After many appeals and complaints from the citizens the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), took a call and widened the road near Malad (West) Railway Station. The BMC began work on widening the route known as the Anand Road after removing encroachments earlier in April.
The one-way road was finished on August 26, and after consulting with the traffic police, it will be declared open on August 28.
The road was originally 13.40 metres wide, but as shops and other structures were built, the length of the road was reduced to 10 meters. Artificial jewelry and other specialty markets had a strong presence in the area. Huge jams are created by the heavy traffic flow and vehicle movement on the limited routes.
The P North Ward had cleared out a space of about 400 square metres in April after demolishing 19 stores. It assisted in restoring the road's original width. The building of 60 metres of the previously encroached segment of Anand Road, which has a total length of 650 metres, was done at the ward level. Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner of the P North ward, said, "We are trying to make it a two-way road so that traffic on the connecting roads can be eased."
A day after the Dindoshi City Civil Court declined to forbid the BMC from moving through with the demolition, the work was started. Suresh Gupta, one of the property owners, filed a court case arguing that buildings on private land could not be demolished without first acquiring the site. The BMC attorney, Dharmendra Vyas, argued that the structures needed to be dismantled as part of infrastructure work to ease the bottleneck near the Malad railway station, and the court dismissed Gupta's request for a stay on the destruction.
In recent times BMC is working on various road-widening initiatives to reduce traffic problems across Mumbai. BMC on August 24, bulldozed a slum area near Bandra East Railway Station to complete a long-delayed work by opening a lane for auto-rickshaws outside the station. The path was becoming more congested due to the structures that were making it challenging for cars to pass.
The structures that were destroyed by a bulldozer were barely built two to three months ago. Residents stated that while sometimes the BMC asserts ownership over the land and other times the Railway authorities do, only the occupants are the ones who suffer amid the ownership issue. Meanwhile, one of the slum residents said that the government authorities promised to accommodate 175 flats with the intention of enticing residents to relocate, but they have given only 35 so far.
Regular commuter Sandeep Kadam claimed that the BMC should have acted much earlier and that the bulldozing act was necessary. "The patch is unleveled, so the local government must also build a suitable road," he said.
The BMC razed an entire chawl in Andheri West that borders SV Road close to the junction with JP Road in May. Near the intersection of the JP route and SV Road, fourteen G+1 structures of a chawl that impeded traffic were demolished in order to widen the route.
The portion of SV Road where the chawls were removed will be made a full 90 feet wide by adding an additional 25 feet of width. The BMC had been sending letters for the past 1.5 years, and the demolition procedure was laborious.
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