Cops red flag 180 parking lots

Thursday, Dec 02, 2010




Municipal Corporation of Delhi`s plan to turn illegal parking lots in the city into authorised ones seems to have backfired. The civic agency had recently floated tenders for 225 parking lots out of which 180 are illegal. Delhi Traffic Police, meanwhile, refused to give NOCs for these parking lots and MCD will now approach the L-G over this issue, seeking his intervention.

``The Environment Pollution Control Authority and the court have clarified that we will have to take clearance from the traffic police to run parking lots in the city,`` said B N Singh, officer-on-special duty, R P Cell.

Justifying the reason behind floating tenders for such sites, Singh added: ``Since most of the 225 parking lots under MCD were anyway running illegally, we decided to go ahead and float tenders for 180 such sites and operate them as authorised parking lots. But with the traffic police refusing to give us permission, MCD commissioner K S Mehra will now meet the L-G on this issue.``

Meanwhile, MCD councillors criticised the officials for going ahead with the tender process without getting NOC from the traffic police and pointed out several illegal sites in the city. ``The problem of unauthorised parking would have never taken place if MCD had registered FIRs in such cases,`` said leader of opposition, J K Sharma. Councillors also alleged that the highest bidder was not allotted the parking lots in many cases.

Explaining this, Singh said in three such cases, the bidder had not submitted relevant documents and had only given the applications. ``In all such cases, the parking lots were allotted to the lower bidder,`` said Singh.

Singh further stated that he was going to now issue a booklet to all 272 councillors on the number of parking lots under MCD, the contractor responsible for running each of these, the period of contract, etc, so that councillors were aware of which parking lots in their areas were unauthorised.

Meanwhile, according to MCD officials, around 20 parking sites under MCD will now be handed over to ex-servicemen so that they can operate them properly.

Original news source http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Cops-red-flag-180-parking-lots/articleshow/7026343.cms#ixzz171m8AEWP