PDP comes up with alternatives to cantilever bombshell

Srinagar, April 06 (Scoop News) –Reacting to the news reports about the govt proposal to construct a concrete cantilever around Dal Lake to facilitate expansion of boulevard, the Peoples Democratic party (PDP) today vowed to resist the plan at every level. In a statement issued here today the party chief spokesperson Naeem Akhtar said “enough is enough. This govt has already done incalculable damage to the ecology and environment of Kashmir and is carrying forward the NC agenda of destroying what God has bestowed this place with. We will not allow this desastrous plan to take off and will organize public resistence to it if that was needed”.

The spokesperson said Dal Lake had been a victim of the greed and politicalmanipulations of NC politicians for the last so many decades but now the party was stretching  its destruction agenda to intolerable levels. The people of Kashmir are already facing the fall out of NC actions which have resulted in the disapearence of green patches and water bodies and now the R&B department has come up with this virtual bombshell that could be treated as a criminal act in any modern society.

Akhtar said there are many alternatives that could be explored to achieve a better traffic flow around Dal without disturbing ecology any further. One of the possibilities is to construct a tunnel under the Kohi Sulieman or Shakaracharya mount that could obviate the need for disturbing the present Boulevard scene. “Mufti Mohammad Sayeed had in fact as chief minister discussed that possibility with leading engineers and experts who had received it with professional approval” Akhtar disclosed. He said the Mufti had even made an announcement to that effect at a function of engineers and had desired a geological assessment of the proposal done. “But after the change of guard that happened soon after, the proposal was shelved” Akhtar regretted.

Akhtar said another option to ease traffic around Dalgate without fiddling with Dal Lake area could be to widen the Gupkar link and upgrade it into a four lane avenue. Should such a bold decision be taken which will involve some sacrifice by the ruling family, Boulevard could even be turned into a pedestrian mall sparing Dal some measure of pollution.

Accusing the NC led government of having lost the capacity to think, PDP spokesperson said, the party had outsourced the city to some politicians of extremely low intellectual caliber who were destroying its natural and man made heritage without any sense of remorse. He said all the works carried out in the name of development were actually contributing to the mess that the city has been turned into. Works were being conceptualized only to benefit contractors of choice without ever thinking about the crisis of civic amenities, traffic, drainage or roads faced by the people. “It is a slap on the face of the government that a dignitary like Anil Ambani had to abandon a trip to Pahalgam becoz of traffic congestion” Akhtar said and wondered what impression this news could have created across the world about the so called preparations of this administration to receive a million plus tourists. “That news will linger for a long time in public memory without doing any credit to Kashmir or its tourism industry” Akhtar said.

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