In the week leading up to Christmas, a newly inaugurated mall on the service road of Ballari Road in north Bengaluru — Phoenix Mall of Asia — was constantly in the news for the massive traffic jams outside the humongous structure. But on Christmas Eve, the situation turned into a nightmare. While the mall has a parking capacity for 2,324 cars and two-wheelers, vehicles of the people who had come to the mall — an estimated four times the capacity — piled up on the road outside with nowhere to go.
Soon after, Police Commissioner B. Dayananda requested the city’s civic body, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), to withdraw the partial occupancy certificate (OC) provided to the mall, citing a plethora of reasons, including insufficient parking facility. The BBMP said that since the building bylaws and zonal regulations were followed by the mall, the withdrawal of the OC was unlikely.
While the all-too-common traffic jams in the burgeoning IT capital have moved on from being “news” to becoming a matter of jokes and memes on social media, what the Christmas Eve chaos highlighted was the complete absence of coordination among civic agencies. “Construction of the structure was going on for years. Why didn’t the agencies concerned say anything about the insufficient parking facility until the mall was up and running?” asked Madappa K., a cab driver who has made several trips to the mall.
