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By:

Rajendra Joshi

3 December 2024 at 9:20:26 am

Blocked roads take life

Kolhapur: Ten minutes. That is the gap the family of Nalini Ganesh Mainkar says may have separated life from death. On Tuesday, as preparations for Ganeshotsav gathered pace in Kolhapur, Mainkar, a resident of Wangibol in Shivaji Peth, suddenly fell critically ill after her blood pressure dropped. Her family immediately called an ambulance. The ambulance came. But it could not reach her home without delay. According to the family and the ambulance driver, roads were blocked at two or three...

Blocked roads take life

Kolhapur: Ten minutes. That is the gap the family of Nalini Ganesh Mainkar says may have separated life from death. On Tuesday, as preparations for Ganeshotsav gathered pace in Kolhapur, Mainkar, a resident of Wangibol in Shivaji Peth, suddenly fell critically ill after her blood pressure dropped. Her family immediately called an ambulance. The ambulance came. But it could not reach her home without delay. According to the family and the ambulance driver, roads were blocked at two or three locations by festival pandals, forcing the ambulance to negotiate alternative routes. By the time Mainkar was taken to hospital, doctors reportedly told the family that she had arrived about 10 minutes late. She died soon afterwards. For the Mainkar family, those 10 minutes are now an unbearable question: could she have survived if the ambulance had reached her on time? No medical conclusion establishing that link has been made public. But the incident has exposed a larger and recurring civic failure—the vulnerability of emergency services when public roads are allowed to become festival spaces. Mainkar lived barely a few minutes away from the Ambabai temple and had served there as a sevekari for several years. On Tuesday, her family watched helplessly as her condition deteriorated while the ambulance struggled to reach the house. The ambulance driver, the family said, acknowledged that the vehicle was delayed because of obstructions created by pandals at multiple points. No Implementation The Kolhapur Municipal Corporation has stipulated that a public festival pandal cannot occupy more than 25 per cent of the width of a road. The regulation is intended to ensure that traffic, pedestrians and emergency vehicles can continue to move. But on the ground, residents say, the distinction between a permitted pandal and a blocked road often disappears. In several parts of the old city, particularly the gaothan areas, festival structures have narrowed or closed roads. In other places, roads have been dug up for drainage and civic works. The result is a maze of bottlenecks at precisely the time when emergency vehicles need unobstructed access. The problem does not end with pandals. During festival processions, arrangements for dedicated passage of ambulances and fire engines are often inadequate. A traffic diversion that causes a commuter a few minutes of inconvenience can have an entirely different consequence for a patient suffering a cardiac emergency, major trauma or respiratory distress.

Choking Mumbai

Correspondent
Apr 22, 2025
2 min read

For decades, Mumbai was perceived as a rare urban oasis, where the saline sweep of the Arabian Sea blunted the worst ravages of India's air pollution. That illusion has now been dispelled. A meticulous four-year study by Respirer Living Sciences (RLS), using data from its AtlasAQ platform, reveals the bleak truth that the city’s air is thick with pollutants all year round, with no ‘clean season’ left.


Mumbai’s annual average levels of PM10 (particulate matter ten microns or less in diameter) have consistently breached the national safety threshold of 60 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m³). This is not merely a seasonal malaise tied to cooler winter months, as once assumed. Alarmingly, the city’s pollution levels persist even through the hot season, a time when improved atmospheric dispersion should offer natural reprieve.


Across the city - from Chakala in Andheri East to Deonar, Kurla, Vile Parle West and Mazgaon - pollution has become an unrelenting, ubiquitous presence.


The culprits are well known: traffic emissions from a burgeoning number of vehicles; unregulated dust from frenzied construction; industrial activity in and around the ports; and a conspicuous lack of dust control measures. Mumbai’s ceaseless growth now risks becoming a chronic liability.


Worryingly, the regulatory response remains sluggish. Mumbai’s urban planning continues to treat clean air as a peripheral concern, not a foundational necessity. Development plans rarely integrate environmental impact assessments in a meaningful way.


A sharper, citywide strategy is urgently needed. Dust suppression rules at construction sites must be enforced strictly, with financial penalties for violators and incentives for best practices. Traffic management systems should be overhauled to ease congestion and encourage the use of public transport. Expansion of clean, reliable mass transit network needs to be urgently prioritised. In addition, comprehensive real-time air monitoring at the ward level should be deployed, enabling authorities to respond to localised pollution spikes swiftly rather than relying on citywide averages that conceal dangerous hotspots.


Longer-term, clean air targets must be hardwired into the city’s master planning and transport policies. Green buffers along major traffic corridors, stricter emission norms for commercial vehicles and incentives for rooftop gardens and urban afforestation could all play a part. Industrial zones near port areas should be subjected to rigorous air quality compliance measures, not token self-certifications. Private developers and large infrastructure firms, often among the worst offenders, must be made stakeholders in the clean air mission through binding regulations.


Mumbai’s commercial dynamism - as a magnet for migrants, entrepreneurs and investors - depends not just on glittering skyscrapers but on something far more basic: the ability to breathe. Unless clean air becomes an unshakeable priority, the city risks suffocating its own future. For a metropolis that prides itself on its resilience against terror attacks, monsoon floods and economic shocks, the real test will be whether it can muster the will to fight an invisible, pervasive enemy slowly corroding the lives of its 20 million citizens.

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