A hearing on a plea by the Mumbai civic body turned into a blunt assessment of the civic sense of citizens on Tuesday, with the Bombay High Court flagging the people's "uncanny knack" for land grab and dumping of waste in drains, which it said causes water-logging in monsoon.
Our habit is to rob our own motherland, the High Court said as it pointed to encroachment of footpaths, rendering them inaccessible for pedestrians.
Citizens should stop blaming the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) alone for monsoon water-logging, a bench of acting Chief Justice Ravindra Ghuge and Justice Gautam Ankhad said, noting that encroachments and clogged drains are "our own creation" and flooding is obvious during monsoon.
"We have an uncanny knack for grabbing lands. We put all the dirt and material inside, and we block the gutters. One small spell of rain blocks the roads in Mumbai. It's our own creation," the bench said.
Stop blaming the civic body, the bench said, stressing that despite being provided with drainage lines and footpaths, citizens lack civic sense and clog everything.
"Footpaths are encroached upon by illegal stalls. You can't walk. What will the corporation do? Our habit is to rob our own motherland. So we grab land, and then we put up our shops and do this illegally," the court remarked.
The bench was hearing a plea filed by the BMC seeking a direction to the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to remove encroachments from its land required for a road-widening project on the Sion-Trombay road.
On Tuesday, senior advocate Milind Sathe, representing the BMC, stated that the civic body had cleared encroachments for the existing 30-foot-wide road, for which nearly 192 trees were also felled.
He, however, said that the remaining land required to widen the road to 50 feet was with DAE, which oversees the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), situated in the vicinity of the road concerned.
Sathe added that if BARC wanted a 50-foot-wide road, the civic body was ready to make it; however, it should provide encroachment-free land between 30 and 50 feet.