Continuing their protest against carbandi in Connaught Place’s inner circle, traders on Saturday staged protest as New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) conducted a mock drill for the pedestrianisation of the shopping hub.
Protesting against restriction on entry of private cars in CP, New Delhi Traders’ Association president Atul Bhargava told The Pioneer, “The council should understand that CP is a shopping hub. Our business will get affected if they plan to run this project for long. During the mock drill, we have noticed that visitors were confused.”
Traders had raised objection to the plan following which the NDMC had tweaked its earlier plan, which was to make the inner circle completely car-free on Sunday and Monday. CP market, along with Chandni Chowk, is one of the locations initially chosen for pedestrianisation.
While carrying out mock drill, NDMC official said, “The objective of this exercise is to improve vehicular movement, regulate parking and facilitate ease of movement for pedestrians.”
“The major interventions during the trial run shall be restricted entry to inner circle, only CP-destined vehicle will be allowed to park in dedicated parking lots and underground Palika parking, direct entry from radial-1 and radial-4 to be restricted, auto/taxi will have restricted access to inner circle and will only be allowed to use middle circle for exit to outer circle and designated pick and drop facilities for taxi and auto shall be operated from six zones on the radial roads,” said council official.
While the civic body has claimed that for convenience of commuters, the NDMC shall depute traffic police consultants, civic wardens and security staff from NDMC, along with traffic police, however, traders said visitors faced difficulties as they seemed confused at the idea.
Meanwhile, the council official said this is a pilot project to be experimented on the weekend (Sunday) and a full-fledged plan will be implemented after taking further inputs from the stakeholders.
“Taking into account all the learning from the exercise, a final plan will be worked out by the consulting firm IPE Global who In January 2017, then Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu had conceptualised the idea, which was taken forward by the NDMC,” quoted a statement from NDMC office.
The plan never took off owing to strong opposition from the traders’ association. The NDMC had earlier this month announced that it will do a trial run of the plan for two consecutive weekends.