City silt: BMC has no dumping place…..Clara Lewis
MUMBAI: With only three weeks left for the onset of the monsoon, the BMC is struggling to find land in the western suburbs to dump silt.
The removal of silt from roadside and stormwater drains is a regular pre-monsoon exercise. However, this year, the BMC is facing a severe land crunch in the western suburbs. With the closure of the Gorai dump and earlier of Chincholi Bunder dump, it was dumping the silt at Madh. In April, when the BMC started the desilting exercise, Congress MLA from Malad, Aslam Sheikh, complained that instead of silt, debris was being dumped on the collector’s land allotted for the purpose at Madh in Malad (W) and that the debris was being dumped on mangroves. Mumbai suburban collector Vishwas Patil then stayed the dumping. It took more than a fortnight before Patil agreed to allow the dumping to be re-started but this time, he reduced the land for dumping from 100 acres to just 8 acres.
“We have estimated that 1.83 lakh cubic metre of silt or 25,000 truckloads will be removed from Bandra to Dahisar. So far, we have removed 8,000 truckloads and the land allotted has already been used. We need at least 30 acres to dump the silt,” said a civic official.