A committee has been formed following a Supreme Court judgment on the issue.
In order to oversee the removal of religious structures, which have come up by encroaching upon public spaces and are impeding the free flow of traffic, the district administration has formed a special committee headed by municipal commissioner Mahesh Zagade.
Announcing this, resident deputy collector Anil Pawar said, “This committee will have the chief executive officer (CEO) of the zilla parishad, officers from cantonment boards, representatives of railways, municipal corporation, municipal councils and police. The meetings will be held every Tuesday.”
The committee has been formed in response to a judgement of the Supreme Court in January asking for the removal of encroachments in the form of religious structures.
Pawar said there are 958 such encroachments within the limits of Pune city, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune Cantonment and neighbouring areas. “The survey for the district is not over and we are waiting for the reports from various municipal councils such as Alandi, Saswad and Talegaon, among others,” Pawar said.
Of the 958 encroachments identified, 88 have been demolished within the limits of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) in the past one month. In all, 547 such structures are still there within the PMC limits.
The first meeting of the committee was held on Tuesday and letters were sent to various municipal councils asking them to speed up their surveys. “The state government has issued directions to deal with such encroachments. We have been asked to monitor the situation with care given the emotive nature of the task,” he said.
The committee has been asked to submit a report to the state government of the very old and important religious structures, which are encroachments in the free flow of traffic.
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