Calcutta, June 13 :    Calcutta, June 13:  What the CMC preaches: Clear city pavements; make way for pedestrians; remove hawkers. What the CMC practices: Block pavements; encroach on roads; harass pedestrians and motorists. One of the most glaring examples: The massive multi-storied Simpark that is coming up on Rawdon Street, promising to become a major traffic nightmare in south/central Calcutta. Having eaten into more than 200 metres of the Rawdon Street pavement, the parking plaza has also encroached on the road itself, narrowing the busy thoroughfare by more than a metre and turning it into a potential bottleneck for cars during rush-hour traffic. Construction of the parking plaza began in April-end and is expected to be completed by mid-August. Being built jointly by the CMC and Simplex Projects, it will cost an estimated Rs 6 crores on a build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) basis, with the civic authorities coughing up half the capital. The CMC has violated its own act with impunity in pushing ahead with its 'road-hogging' car park. Sections 371 and 372 of the CMC Act, 1980, clearly state that any encroachment of the pavement or carriageway, depriving citizens of their right to free and safe passage, is prohibited. Note: The civic authorities had used this very Act to evict hawkers from the streets during its much-hyped Operation Sunshine. Even the High Court had upheld the eviction of the hawkers on the basis of this very Act. 'The civic authorities can turn anything around on it head if it suits their convenience, while the common people have to suffer for it,' said Subhas Dutta, general secretary of the Ganatantrik Nagarik Samity, who has been waging a number of battles for better civic conditions. 'This project is bound to create immense traffic problems and it is the common people who have to suffer for it,' he said. But mayor Subrata Mukherjee is unfazed. 'We will go ahead with this project,' he said on Wednesday. 'This is in public interest and, therefore, there is no room for any controversy.' Hyped as 'India's first computerised, multi-level car parking lot', it can accommodate 189 cars at one go and during its proposed 10-hour operation time, will provide parking for about 1,500 cars. The CMC has tentatively decided that it will charge a Rs-10 fee for every hour of parking and Rs 50 for the entire day. A second such plaza is being planned in the Lindsay Street area, work on which is scheduled to begin some time next year. But the flouting of the CMC Act is hardly bothering the city's custodians. According to the CMC's director-general, projects and development, Nilangshu Bose, the municipal commissioner, as trustee of the CMC Act, can relax any of its provisions in the 'greater interest of society'. And this is where the crunch comes. 'Why should society pay for the privileged; the privileged should pay for society,' counters Dutta. 'This inevitably happens when the CMC looks only at its own interest at the cost of everything else.' But Bose, having conceded that some provisions of the Act would have to be relaxed, says reassuringly that encroachment on the road will be pushed back to the pavement once work is complete. 'The scaffolding and the pillars on the road will be removed later,' he said. 'They have been erected temporarily only to provide a buffer zone for motorists.' Meanwhile, members of the Christian community on Wednesday launched a movement for the relocation of the parking plaza, saying that it blocked one of the two entrances to the South Park Street cemetery, which is also the oldest burial ground for Christians in the city. The Christian Burial Board had recently undertaken a project to set up a funeral parlour on the western side of the cemetery. But the parking plaza would block the entrance to the proposed project, the burial board authorities said.