The recent report in ‘The Hitavada’ on the pathetic condition of the Gandhi Nagar–Shraddhanandpeth Square road exposes a deeper, citywide crisis: the Nagpur Municipal Corporation’s habit of mindless digging, ill-planned redesigning, and stubborn refusal to learn from its own failures. What is being projected as “development” has, in reality, made daily life miserable for citizens and turned city roads into accident-prone obstacle courses. For years now, NMC has subjected residents to continuous digging under different schemes—water pipelines, drainage, cables—without any co-ordinated planning or proper restoration. Roads are dug, left uneven, half-cemented, narrowed, and poorly lit, forcing commuters to gamble with their lives every single day.

 

Two-wheeler riders, senior citizens, schoolchildren, and pedestrians are the worst sufferers, with accidents increasing due to craters, loose gravel, sudden bottlenecks, and pitch-dark stretches. Even more alarming is NMC’s refusal to learn from its complete failure of the so-called “walking street” from VNIT Square to Kachipura Square. Instead of becoming a pedestrian-friendly zone, it has turned into a nuisance for nearby residents—a hub for smoking, liquor consumption, and anti-social activities. This issue has been repeatedly highlighted in ‘The Hitavada’. Yet, the civic body has neither enforced discipline nor corrected its flawed design. Despite this glaring failure, NMC has shockingly replicated the same experiment on the already narrow and heavily congested road from Shraddhanandpeth to Gandhi Nagar. This stretch was never suitable for such an intervention. It already suffers from heavy traffic flow, rampant encroachments, on-street parking, and commercial activity.

 

Narrowing it further without first addressing these issues shows utter disconnect from ground realities. The result is predictable: daily traffic jams, road rage, delayed ambulances, frustrated residents, and rising accident risks. Now that an elected body is in place at NMC, there can be no more excuses. Elected representatives must act on a war footing to end citizens’ misery. Roads must first serve their primary purpose—safe and smooth movement of people and vehicles. Declaring and strictly enforcing smoking-, drinking-, and narcotics-free zones is non-negotiable. Encroachments must be removed, illegal parking penalised, and streetlights restored immediately. Most importantly, if a walking street cannot be used by citizens for the purpose it was built, it should be removed without hesitation. Roads must be widened back to their original capacity, and accountability must be fixed.

 

The cost of such disastrous, unscientific projects should be recovered from those who conceived, approved, and implemented them without due diligence. Only then will future officials think twice before imposing half-baked “development” on a suffering city. Nagpur does not need cosmetic experiments. It needs planning, accountability, and above all, respect for the lives of its citizens.