PMC is working on war footing to ease civic woes: Kareer

Q&A

Pune, known for good weather, adequate water supply, and more importantly, skilled manpower thanks to a sound network of good educational institutions, is fast emerging as an alternative to Banglore as an IT capital of India.

However, problems such as narrow roads, vehicular pollution, absence of good public transport system and power shortage are holding back the city's further progress. Business Standard spoke to Pune Municipal Commissioner Nitin Kareer about his plans to solve these problems.

Public transport system in Pune is in complete mess leading to a rise in personal vehicles, thus increasing pollution in the city.

The situation was not always like that. But it is true that in the last decade the public transport was neglected to a great extent by the city administration. However, we are taking corrective actions.

The proposal to merge Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) and Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Transport (PCMT) has been accepted by the state government and we are working out the nitti gritties of the merger.

The new body would be able to maximise the resources of both the transport organisations and serve the city in a better manner.

In one year, we have added 350 new buses in PMT fleet, which helped us to increase the frequency of our services. The number of passengers carried by the PMT per day has almost doubled from around 4 lakh passengers per day to 7 lakh. This improvement in services is creating more demand and we would try to meet this additional demand.

Narrow and bad quality roads is one of the major problem faced by the city, what is PMC doing on this front ?

There are limitations to widening the roads in the old part of the city as roads in these parts have been already been widened upto the limit proposed in the development plan.

However, we have undertaken widening of all the arterial roads which lead into the city such as Pune-Satara Road, Pune-Solapur Road, Univesrity Road etc. Besides, the number of flyovers and subway projects are also going on in the city.

Then we are planning a number of initiatives such as elevated road along the river bed from a Rs 1,000 crore loan extended to us by the Japan Bank of International Cooperation.

We have also announced the unique policy of giving concession in the property tax if IT companies come forward to lay roads proposed in the development plan. We have already received the proposals from them.

Though, power is not exactly your territory, but since Pune is becoming an IT hub, power shortage is one major problem. As the civic chief, what are the initiatives you have taken to sort out this problem?

We are coming out with the policy, which gives concession to smart building (designed in such a manner which would lead to minimum consumption of power and fitted with energy saver power equipments) or even one installs such energy saver power equipments in an old building.

In fact, we are trying to lead by example as we have undertaken major drive to fit energy-saving equipments in PMC offices spread across the city on street lights etc. We are coming out with a model building in which some PMC offices would be located and it would have all these features.