Marine Drive gym installation: Days after fiasco, Sena corporators hold meeting with top BMC officials

Trushna Vishwasrao, leader of the house said, “A lot of corporators have been complaining about drainage issues, road repairs not being addressed by the officials. We also wanted a solution to the long pending e-tendering problem. Therefore, we had called for the meeting. This has nothing to do with the gymnasium. We had all the permissions to set-up two fitness station on the promenade.”

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Sources from the administration, however, said that such meetings where all officials are involved are either taken up before monsoon to keep a tab on BMC’s pre-monsoon work or before beginning new projects from October. The source said, “We have never seen meetings involving only one party. This definitely involves high-level instructions to keep a tab on the working of the officials.”

The meeting, interestingly, comes at a time when the C ward official dismantled the fitness station inaugurated by Yuva Sena chief Aaditya Thackeray and Bollywood actor Dino Morea last week.

Though the ward official was asked to re-install the gymnasium within a few hours, she wrote a letter to the Municipal Commissioner’s office a day later stating that Morea’s firm had not taken requisite permissions from the ward office to install the fitness station.

Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta also demanded an inquiry into the incident last week. A senior civic official said, “Though the Sena had permissions to install the gymnasiums, the location was not specified as a result of which they took permission only from the A ward and not the C ward. There was some mis-communication between officials on that day.”

The gymnasium in A ward is installed opposite the Kapur Mahal, while the one in question, in the C ward, is opposite the Hindu gymkhana on the promenade.

The day-long drama has resulted in a political slug-fest with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) challenging to tear down the fitness station if the BMC does not take action. Congress corporator Vinod Shekhar also alleged that he had made a similar demand a few years back but was denied permission to install a fitness station on the promenade.

tanushree.venkatraman@expressindia.com