User:Sanjay sanjeevani

Ganpati 08, Making the Festival more Festive…..

Our beloved Pune city & Ganpati Festival are two inseparable things; rather Ganesh Festival is one of the backbones of this cultural capitol of Maharashtra!

But! Yeah always the But! Is this back bone of ours getting weakened? As every year before arrival of the Lord Ganesh, the news papers are full of controversies. Then may it be noise pollution & loud speaker timing or the Mandap ( pendol) permission or the procession routes or the procession time itself! It's more of embracement for the common man reading & hearing the entire cross arguments & for whom it's a festival of joy & culture. Ok, some bothering, inconvenience is bound to be there but what matters is there are many a things which can make the festival better, more enjoyable & without less hassles to the citizens as well the visitors.

To start with it's the pendols of various Mandals (local area wise groups). Mainly the objection is taken regarding the pendols location & the damage it causes to the existing roads during erection because of the conventional supporting system. And the traffic congestion they cause. Here what we need is a proper permission process as on one hand where the Municipal Corporation is very particular about temporary shades even at construction work then why it's so liberal about the pendols erection?

Neither one of the norms right from the location, size, and material used, duration of the pendol is fixed nor it is known to any of the authorities. Had the locations & size are fixed then a lot can be done about designing the support in advance & damage of road as well traffic management issues during the days of festival can be taken care in better way. At least the mandals which are prominent & have more than 5 years

precedence, there we can think of 3 years permission so every year the mandals don't have to go thru the process.

Regarding the sound, if we can make such mandals compulsory to have a decibel showing machine in front of pendols then it will be an automatic check as transparency will be there. The local body can provide this instrument or can be donated by many private organizations in the city. On the very same line its electric connections & load sanctioning for the lighting of the pendols. Most of the time the MSEB is unaware of neither load demand nor the connections are supervised by technically competent personals. This may lead some day fatal accident as in night hours the crowd get gathered in large number in a comparatively confined place, to watch the decoration in the pendol.

What happens mostly is all the concerned authorities wake up before just few days of the festival & then as it's a public participated festival it's not possible for the Mandals to change the theme or they don't have such infrastructure & that why they oppose the suggestions. The leaders naturally go with the mandals as all major mandals are lead by local politician.

Talking about the last day procession ( Mirawanuk) or even during most of the evenings when the city gets visitors from all around the state & country too, what kind of medical as well hygiene infrastructures we have? The answer will be a big no! It's very embracing, especially for the ladies to answer a nature call, which is bound to happen when you are spending more than 4-5 hours on street. Actually we need lots of public toilets in good maintained condition all over the city & medical booths too along with proper signs to guide people accordingly. The public body can tie up with the existing commercial places for allowing use of their toilet facilities for the visitors too.

Here one more thing I want to point out, even after knowing the spread of the number of mandals across the city, neither the Public Body nor the Association of all Mandals, nor any private organization, nor NGO's has thought of having a map or guidebook containing information of all the major Ganpati Mandal's location & road map to reach there. Many a visitors are from out station & even citizens from different suburbs have to waste much of the time to locate the particular mandal, especially in a city where we have poor public transport. This results in spending more money for rickshaws or on fuel which can be saved if proper guide book is there. These are small things but that shows our attitude looking at the convenience of the society.

It's high time to introduce a policy well drafted for the pendols & for the festival in itself covering the norms & responsibilities for both Mandals as well, the Government authorities. And this work must be done well in advance to avoid eleventh hour objections & giving every body proper time to cover most of the aspects of the issue.

And it's equally important that we should adopt such systems with open mind, which ultimately are in the interest of the common man for whom the festival is!

Sanjay Deshpande

Sanjeevani Dev

Envo-Power Committee, PBAP