- Administration gears up for Kumbh 2010

By Santosh Chauhan
Haridwar, 9 Apr: The state and the district administration have started gearing up for the Kumbh to be held here in 2010. Since it will be the first Kumbh to be held here after the creation of the state, mammoth crowds of devotees are expected to congregate in the holy city during the Kumbh. The administration has started work on the mela related projects, so that these are completed well in time, at least before November 2009.
The Kumbh Mela Officer, Anand Vardhan, says that an amount of nearly Rs 350 crores will be spent on Kumbh mela related projects. He says that the first priority of the administration is traffic management, first at the entry points in the mela area, which spreads to parts of Haridwar, Dehradun and Tehri districts, and afterwards in the mela area by plying the city buses to ferry the devotees from the parking places to their destinations in the mela area.
"We are going to increase five times the parking capacity from what it was in the last Kumbh in 1998, by expanding the existing parking places and also by developing new parking sites such as at Gauri Shankar in BHEL-Haridwar, and on the Raiwala-Rishikesh and Haridwar-Laksar routes. We are also going to double the mela area by expanding it on both sides of the Ganga and by constructing new ghats,"says the Mela Officer.
The mela sources say that, this time, 80% of the mela projects will be of permanent nature, so that they are not dismantled after the mela gets over and they continue to benefit the citizens of the area afterwards. The main thrust of the mela projects is upon the creation of infrastructure, such as the construction of a railway bridge at Laksar, the installation of two power stations of 33 KV capacity, the construction of new bridges, the construction of 12 overhead water tanks, the laying of sewer lines in the entire mela area and the repair and construction of new roads. Diwakar Bhatt, Minister of Urban Development and minister in-charge of the Kumbh mela, told Garhwal Post that the services of the Shri Ram Institute of Industrial Research, New Delhi, had been hired as a third party for quality control of the construction work and to ensure transparency.
The mela administration says that its main objective is to make the great cultural event a hassle free affair and to provide maximum facilities to the devotees, with the least inconvenience to the citizens of the mela area.