Civic gardens to now be open till 9pm

Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to keep all civic gardens open for 12 hours, which means they will now be accessible to citizens until 9 pm. Earlier, these gardens were kept open only for an hour between 7pm and 8pm during the evenings. Now however, the civic body has decided to keep them open from 3 pm to 9 pm.

Currently, civic gardens are open to citizens only for seven hours a day and security personnel bars citizens from entering them after 8 pm. There are 750 gardens under the BMC’s garden department, which open and shut at different timings. There is no uniformity apart from causing residents inconvenience. According to activists, the working population does not get a chance to visit such gardens as they shut soon during evening hours.

To tackle this problem and let citizens avail these spaces for a longer duration, the BMC has decided to keep them open for 12 hours every day.

According to Jitendra Pardeshi, garden superintendent of the BMC, the gardens will be open to the public between 6am and 12pm in the mornings and between 3pm and 9pm in the evenings.

Initially, the gardens were open only for one hour in the evening. The maintenance and upkeep of the gardens will be carried out between 12 pm and 3 pm. The BMC has instructed that a board be put up at the entrance gates of all such gardens with revised timings.