Come, park your car in heart of city. Rates: Negotiable

Kolkata: Motorists must pay Rs 50 an hour to get a space in a car parking lot on JL Nehru Road (Chowringhee), where the official rate is Rs 10 an hour. In the absence of continuous vigil, car parking agencies have started extorting motorists in some of the prime areas. What is worse, the parking fee is being collected manually, defying the KMC rule of collecting fees using an app for the benefit of motorists.A TOI survey found parking attendants demanding Rs 50 for an hour from motorists opposite Grand Hotel. If a motorist insists on displaying the KMC rate chart, he or she is denied a space. The rate goes up after evening. "The attendants told me parking would cost Rs 60 an hour, but I ended up paying Rs 100 for a couple of hours to park on JL Nehru Road opposite Firpo's Market," said Tuhin Sen, a motorist from Ballygunge.
Several others to whom TOI spoke said they were forced to park in Chowringhee, and pay five times the KMC rates, as all other parking lots in the area have ceased to exist. Police did not turn the place into a no-parking zone but hawkers have taken over all the space on Bertram Street, Humayun Place and Lindsay Street. According to a KMC official, the parking lots in and around New Market include the sanctioned lot on Bertram Street, which can accommodate 40 cars, Humayun Place, that can hold 15 cars, and Lindsay Street, which has space for 30 cars. Instead, fewer than 20 cars can park on these three streets now. As a result, the entire pressure falls on JL Nehru Road, which has parking space for 80 cars. This growing demand for space on JL Nehru Road has led to the birth of fake agencies that are operating unauthorised car parking systems on the opposite flank. Nandini Banerjee, a lawyer from Maniktala, was asked to pay Rs 50 for an hour to park in an unauthorised lot on JL Nehru Road near Monohardas Tarag. "I protested and asked the parking attendant, who was not in uniform, to show me the rate chart. He simply refused and asked me to find another parking slot in the area," Banerjee said. "The entire Bertram Street, which used to be the primary parking lot for New Market shoppers, has been usurped by hawkers. Most old-time shoppers have stopped visiting the heritage market because of the lack of parking spaces. While the civic body and police made it mandatory for other private markets and malls to provide huge parking lots, they allowed the parking lots around New Market to be illegally occupied," said SS Hogg Market Traders' Association president Ashok Gupta. Two decades ago, around 200 cars could be parked around New Market; now the number has dwindled to a handful. Though members of trade bodies from markets in the area have urged KMC and cops to free up the streets and restore parking lots, there has reportedly been no action yet. Motorists have also started questioning the absence of the app introduced in 2023 to bring transparency to the parking system. With a view to achieving this target, the civic brass asked the agencies to get ready for over 500 points of sale (POS) machines that were initially required to offer the app-based parking payments in several parts of the city. A KMC car parking department official conceded the system had suffered a setback due to a section of unscrupulous car parking agencies who demanded a hike in the parking fee. Though KMC is yet to take a decision on revision of car parking fees, the civic body's car parking department officials are getting flooded with complaints from citizens, accusing parking attendants from several agencies of charging extra and misbehaving with motorists unwilling to fulfil their demands. A KMC official said the matter is getting worse as a few agencies have resorted to giving fake receipts to cheat motorists in some prime commercial areas. Several parking agencies have allegedly been overcharging motorists, giving them the impression that the civic body has hiked the base fee from Rs 10 to Rs 20 per hour.