10 No. Market: Rise in biz activities adds to traffic chaos, parking woes

Bhopal: As Arera Colony, particularly the patch from Bharat Mata Square onwards, becomes more commercialised with huge showrooms, hotels, bars, restaurants, commercial complexes, and offices mushrooming in and around 10 No. Market, heavy unregulated traffic and congestion on the roads, particularly in the rush evening hours, has become routine. The parking of vehicles and rampant encroachments by vendors and shopkeepers on the road have only added to the woes of commuters.
“You look at the unruly traffic and the rampant encroachments in the patch from 10 No. Market to E-6 and beyond. It’s a horrible situation. There are vendors of all kinds occupying the road, vehicles parked on the road, and vehicles crawling rather than moving on the road. If the situation worsens further, we may have to use a helicopter to go to our hospital and come back home,” said a doctor, who lives in the area.
The doctor may have exaggerated a little in describing the traffic chaos in her area, but there appears to be unanimity among the residents that Arera Colony, once a peaceful residential colony, lost its peace amidst rampant commercialisation and accompanying factors like heavy crowds on the roads, traffic jams, parking issues, and coaching centres, shops, offices, and commercial complexes penetrating into the core residential areas now from the main roads, which hardly have any residential houses left.
“Houses in this residential colony are being bought over and converted into commercial space. In fact, residents of Arera Colony, once supposed to be one of the most sought-after places to live, are scared. The way the entire colony is getting commercialised, you may soon have a situation like Chowk Market, where even walking straight without impinging onto someone would be a problem,” said Shantanu Sharma, who is a member of Arera Vikas Samiti, which is fighting to maintain the residential status of Arera Colony.

He further said that parking is not a problem at the marketplace only, but inside the colonies as well, vehicles can be seen parked outside an office or a commercial complex as it has no space for parking. “When you have a 2000 sq feet building and you have used the entire land to construct the building leaving no space for parking, persons coming to the offices or any other commercial establishment in that building and their staff would obviously be parking their vehicle by the roadside and there would be traffic congestion,” he said.
Purnendu Shukla, who is the President of Senior Friends Society comprising residents of E-4, which is also working to protect the residential status of Arera Colony, said it’s not about traffic congestion and haphazard parking alone. “I lodged complaints about a hotel and a house, which was being constructed on the backside of my house. We have an FAR of .75 in Arera Colony and therefore, at the most, two-storied buildings can be constructed here, but everyone who is building a hotel or for some other commercial purpose like renting the building to a bank, is building multi-storied buildings. It stops the flow of air or sunrays to residential houses built according to rules like ours,” he said.
He further said that hospitals were the first to violate the land use norm in Arera Colony and now “it’s free for all” as residential houses are being bought up and destroyed, and by joining two-three residential plots, commercial buildings, hotels, restaurants, and showrooms are being constructed. Shukla said, “You tell me if it’s not a nuisance for anyone living in a residential colony to see one day that a hospital or a hotel has come up next to his house, and this is what is happening in Arera Colony.”
He said that recently a notification was issued by the nazool officer for the construction of a multi-level parking in a portion of the parking space at 10 No. Market where you have shops of flowers and bouquets, but we opposed the proposal because they wanted to formally change the land use of that patch to ‘commercial’ from residential and also proposed to construct shops on the ground floor.
“I am not sure whether people would have parked their vehicles on the upper floor of the multi-level parking or not, but new shops would have meant more crowds and more vehicles in the area. It would also have allowed them an excuse to change the land use of the area into commercial or commercial-cum-residential from residential, which they have not been able to do till now despite continuing commercialisation of the area. But, they know all the same that it’s illegal,” he added.