Bandra-Worli Sea Link: De-linked from safety measures

Sunday’s suicide attempt from the iconic 4.7km-long Bandra-Worli Sea Link has opened a can of worms. Other than the six closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, the staff at the sea link has no equipment to monitor such situations. Sources, in fact, claim that the cameras on the toll plaza are not functional.

The city police had asked for Rs50 crore some time ago to get the sea link fully secured. Needless to say, the file’s gathering dust somewhere - many state bureaucrats have ruled out the possibility of buying any expensive equipment for it.

The security is so lax that the woman who attempted suicide on Sunday walked right through the Worli connector up till the fifth pole. When the security guards finally woke up and blew whistles to raise an alarm, she still managed to walk from the Bandra end till the Worli end, before leaping into the sea. In the last two years , at least two others have tried to commit suicide by jumping off the sea link.

“The responsibility to monitor any human intrusion on the sea link rests with the toll operator (the Mumbai Entry Point Ltd — MEPL). But, if they are not equipped enough to monitor the scenario through CCTVs, how can they prevent such incidences?” asked a senior official of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC).

The corporation had conducted tests on a scanner at the toll plaza. But with the police’s Rs7-crore scanner failing to serve the purpose, this Rs20-crore project’s future looks dicey.

Besides slipping on security, the authorities have also failed to keep their promise of making the sea link tech-savvy.

The MSRDC and the builder Hindustan Construction Company had got about 5,000 on-board units, which were handed over to the MEPL for sale. But, just 42 of these were sold.

“The MEPL was appointed the temporary toll collector since the project was to be handed over to Reliance Infrastructure to construct the next phase up till Haji Ali. But since R-Infra has not taken over, none of these systems is up and running,” said MEPL managing director Jayant Mhaiskar.