The extra FSI granted to builders to facelift cluttered locales of central Mumbai would eat up the already exhausted resources, water, sewage, and parking lot there. The narrow streets will add to acute traffic problem in an area that is already infamous for bad traffic.

 

The good news is that the sky-kissing ‘match-box’ towers are fast mushrooming in one of the oldest part of Central Mumbai. The bad one is, these would add to enormous pressure to the already scarce infrastructure available there.

 

Temkar Mohollah, Hujrah Mohollah, Teli Mohollah, Chawli Mohollah are the few densely populated areas of Mumbai central which are fast metamorphosing into a steel and concrete hub. In a few years, no doubt, the development would make an impressive skyline, but the fallout of this would add to the agony of the people.

 

This high density area is criss-crossed by narrow lanes and by-lanes with limited infrastructure like water supply, parking space, sewage and sewerage outlets, besides a flood of other yawning problems.

 

These streets are soon to see over fifty towers in the next five to six years. This means ten-twelve sky-scrapers will soon sprang up on both the sides of the 18-25 ft wide streets of these mohollahs. Every tower would have 4-6 floors reserved for parking space. On an average the towers would have 20-25 floors each, given the extra FSI allotted to them in a hasty drive to bring about a facelift to these utterly disorganized locales. And the worst part of the problem is that each building would brag of at least 100-125 cars. And the ten buildings on each street would mean on an average 1000-1200 cars. Can a street as wide as 20 feet could manage this whopping numbers of vehicles during wee hours? Plus multiply this with the total number of vehicles in the proposed 100 towers that is coming up soon. The astronomical rise in vehicles will choke up the traffic of this bad traffic island. The things will go haywire.

 

Ejaz Belim of Falak Developer, who is building his 23-storey tower at Hujrah Mohollah was acerbic when pointed out that developers are brazenly violating extra FSI allotted to them by the government. He caustically replied, “Why don’t you pursue government regarding such technicalities? We are just developing this area and not at all interested in such things.”

 

Syed Manzar, a businessman owning software firm, said, 'In a horde to earn green bucks these land sharks in collusion with government officials has little concern over its debilitating impact in future."