“In the coming days, we are going to take two difficult decisions”: Collector Dudi

What is the guarantee that the Pune Grand Tour is continued after you are transferred?

Its budgetary provision is such that the government has spent only on road infrastructure. The money required to execute this race, other than roads, which will be in  four categories.

One category is award money, fees of international commissioners, technical guides, everybody.  The second part is, to execute the race, we have to have event management. The stage is being built, etc. The third cost is branding, marketing, making videos, and pushing creatives. The fourth category is broadcasting. It will be live on Jio Star and Star Sports in 35 countries.

This whole cost is given by our sponsors. Bajaj is one of the sponsors. Out of total 35 crores, they are giving Rs 20 CR. Then there is Mr Poonawalla, he is giving Rs 6 CR. Then there are other partners, like Panchsheel, they are providing all the hospitality plus Rs 2 CR. Then there is Ruby, who is providing all the health services, ambulances, doctors and everything. The answer to your question is that this project should not be run with a collector. When will that happen? When the people here will take ownership of it. So we have involved these people who are based in Pune and who were very excited about the tour. 

The removal of speed breakers on roads due to this race has caused safety concerns.

First, it is a misconception that accidents are less due to speed breakers. The second thing is, the design of the speed breaker (in Pune) is very poor. The cycle race does not say that you should not put a speed breaker. The cycle race says that all your speed breakers should be with a gradient. This cycle race is beneficial to us. Wherever we have removed all the speed breakers, we will make ones from next year with proper gradients.

You have said that pollution is the biggest concern in this race, what is going to be done about that?

We will take some temporary steps to reduce pollution during the race. For the future, there are two main reasons for pollution in Pune. There is rampant construction and they do not follow SOPs. So this is the biggest thing due to which you see a lot of particulate matter. The second reason is that outdated vehicles are coming in our way. We should have removed them by now. So for this, in the coming days, we are going to take two difficult decisions.

First, we will remove vehicles beyond an age range so that at least we have clean fuel vehicles on our roads. Second is that we have brought an SOP which will follow all the construction and we are thinking of doing something unique for it. Wherever construction is going on, we will install an AQI meter and have a live feed. We will have to do it in such a way that the data of the feed should be automatically generated and automatically the red flag should come. It should not be human dependent.

Although the PMC is not mine, but as a Collector, disaster management is and it is my responsibility to do something about pollution. Fortunately, Naval Kishore Ram Sir is there. Considering that, we are going to make some changes in the coming time so that this AQI should go down.