PUNE: When the Build Operate Transfer (BOT) committee of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) on January 12 declared that it would free the Laxmi Road of its heavy parking, the most dense concentration of commercial concerns anywhere, and shift it to the nearby river bed road, it was not the first time that such an idea was mooted. The proposal is to get the vehicles parked in the river bed, from where a bus service would carry people to Laxmi Road, the city’s most glittering and favourite shopping district - known for its ready-made garments and precious metals showrooms.

As Pune metamorphosed from a city of close to a million souls in the early nineties to that of nearly 40 lakh now, Laxmi Road continues to hold its sway as the single biggest shopping attraction.

From small-time road-side vendors to mega shops owners continue to build on this attraction that the road holds, ensuring the milling crowd never fades. Scores of attempts, most of them half hearted ones, have been made to decongest the area of vehicular traffic without much success.

But now the PMC believes it must step in more aggressively.

Unlike similar announcements earlier, the PMC appears to be serious on this occasion. To begin with, it has the sanction of the BOT committee. This solves its biggest problems of raising resources for the project.

The BOT committee’s decision has evoked strong reactions from people on either side of the debate, and it clearly looks like people in Pune, will subject this project to minute scrutiny, before it rolls out of the planning stage.

Leader of the BJP at the PMC, Mukta Tilak, whose party has a large following in the area, was obviously the first one to react.

 “I don’t think the PMC fully realises the huge implications of its proposal to shift parking facilities to the river bed. The area still has quite a few old wadas that have absolutely no facility for parking. Most of the wadas redeveloped according to the old development control (DC) rules, which did not take into account parking facilities. It's not enough to think of customers and the residents alone. A huge number of people who work in these commercial concerns too need parking facilities within walking distance.”