The Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation (BMC) plans to send a letter to the Bidhannagar Commissionerate requesting them to remove scrapped vehicles that have been lying along service roads of VIP Road for long, a senior civic official said.
A number of junked and condemned cars, buses and motorbikes have been lying along the service lane of VIP Road in front of the Bidhannagar Commissionerate’s assistant commissioner’s (airport zone) office in Baguiati.
Another stretch where such vehicles are parked is the service road of the airport-bound flank of VIP Road, around 100m from the Lake Town crossing.
On Saturday, this newspaper spotted several such junked vehicles.
To top it all, the entire area has multiple mounds of garbage lying around.
Junked vehicles have been marked as potential breeding grounds for the dengue-causing Aedes aegypti mosquito.
“There was a time when this area was lined with trees. Now, not only have the trees been felled but the entire area has started to look like a scrap yard. Mosquitoes buzz throughout the day. We live in fear of dengue and malaria,” Prajwal Saha, a resident of Lake Town said.
Debraj Chakraborty, the mayoral council member in charge of BMC’s solid waste management, said he had raised the issue with senior officers of the Bidhannagar Commissionerate a number of times.
Chakraborty said he had requested the police several times to remove the condemned vehicles as they are potential breeding grounds for mosquitoes.
“I had asked the senior officers of the Bidhannagar Commissionerate to ensure that these vehicles are shifted elsewhere. However, no action has been taken. I had raised the issue at the inter-agency dengue meeting that was held a couple of months back. I don’t know why no action has been taken yet,” Chakraborty said.
He added that he will send “a letter of request” to the Bidhannagar Commissionerate to clear the area of such cars.
Asked about the mounds of garbage in the area Chakraborty promised action.
Many residents whom this newspaper spoke to said they were tired of such promises.
Gaurav Sharma, the commissioner of Bidhannagar police, said that he will see what can be done.
“Such vehicles had either met with accidents or had been seized in connection with a case. There is a procedure to claim them back but in many cases people don’t do that and hence they remain parked for several months. We need court clearance before they can be removed. We will see what we can do,” Sharma told The Telegraph.
“We have requested the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation as well as the New Town Kolkata Development Authority to allocate us some space away from resiential areas to park these vehicles,” said Sharma.