With less than two months remaining to submit feedback over the proposed draft Development Plan (DP) 2034, citizen groups are stepping forward to help citizens understand the plan and enable them to register their suggestions and objections.
After several months of study, the civic body finally released the draft DP on May 27. It has given a two-month period to citizens asking them to send in their opinion before July 29.
In an effort to explain the DP, which will determine the use of city land for the next 20 years, citizens’ groups are planning several measures to ensure the peoples’ participation.
The Hamara Shehar Mumbai Abhiyaan (HSM) recently organised a workshop on the revised draft DP and Development Control Rules (DCRs) at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which nearly 70 people across the city attended. In the workshop, the DCRs and DP maps were explained and a plan to take this forward was formulated.
“Over the next 30 days, HSM will be conducting meetings and workshops on the revised draft DP 2034. We have also set up a ‘DP facilitation centre’ at TISS Deonar to enable people’s participation in the DP. This will be for anyone who wants to understand the DP. The DP facilitation centre will have documents relating to the DP, conduct short trainings on demystifying the DP and offer to conduct community meetings in communities that require it,” said Sitaram Shelar from the HSM.
Civic activist Godfrey Pimenta said that his organisation Watchdog Foundation would be arranging DP workshops too. “There is a need to make people familiar with the DP. We will holding several workshops across the city like last year, when we had conducted about 40 workshops on DP,” he added.
The BMC has made the proposed draft DP, draft DCR and draft DP report available on its websites.
