City needs vision document for 2050

PUNE: While admitting that the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) urgently needs to prepare a vision for the planned growth of the city by the year 2050, municipal commissioner Mahesh Zagade on Friday said, "Unfortunately we are still anchored in the past."
The civic chief added that the development plan (DP) of the city, which was prepared in 1987, should have been executed by 2007, and a new plan should have been prepared to monitor the city's planning.
"But we are behind by two years and are yet to launch our next plan. And, I still don't know whether the next plan will be ready in a year or so as we cannot even accelerate the process of finalising the new plan," Zagade said at a discussion on Vision 2050', organised by the Indian Institute of Architects, Pune Centre, here on Friday.
The senior bureaucrat, however, refused to blame politicians for non-execution of the DP and for the proliferation of slums in the city. "For bad planning and poor execution I will blame the administration the most. We always blame the politicians, but my experience tells me it's the bureaucracy which is responsible for this. Ninety per cent of the blame goes to the administration, five per cent to lack of public participation and a very small percentage to politicians," Zagade said.
"There are laws to prevent unauthorised constructions. The proliferation of illegal slums and encroachments would not have happened if the MRTP Act was followed. Pune would have been a totally different city had the MRTP sections 52 and 53 been implemented properly," he said. (The Maharashtra Regional and Town Planning Act 1966 section 52 empowers the civic body to impose penalty on unauthorised construction, while section 53 gives the power to remove any unauthorised construction).
When asked about what the PMC was doing to improve the condition of city roads, Zagade said that the new roads being constructed with grants received under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission were being made in accordance with well laid norms. "We will soon draft similar norms and policy for construction of smaller roads also," he added.
Zagade, however, lamented the fact that the civic administration had not been able to execute a comprehensive traffic and transportation plan. "When I took charge, my officials showed me a comprehensive mobility plan. When I asked was there similar efforts earlier, they showed me more than 15 such plans but none of them has been fully executed."
The civic chief said that the "objective behind planning should be to ensure that it provides quality life to citizens. Mere paper work has no meaning."