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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Supply chain solution for Ganpati

Every year the Ganpati immersions cause havoc on Mumbai's traffic. This year when the roads look so unlike roads and the rains still heavy, the effect of Ganpati on traffic has been even worse. Being an atheist, it's particularly painful for me. But when I see the happy faces (especially the poorer sections of the society) dancing around the idol during the immersion trip, I think it's all right, I can live through this.

But I do have some proposals for making Ganpati friendlier for Mumbai's traffic. The obvious one would be to restrict immersions to just one day instead of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 11th days. But it would be difficult to implement given such strong religious undertones. The other proposal would be to restrict the number of Ganpatis. So rather than have a Ganpati for each apartment complex within Kandivli, why not have just one for the whole of Kandivli (E)? But again, being an officially democratic country, we won't do that. So my solution is this - instead of taking Ganpati to the water, why not bring water to Ganpati. Multiple trucks filled with water and with an open top can operate through several locations. So all the idols at Kandivli can be immersed in the tank carried by the truck operating in Kandivli? Won't it work? When I said this to a Delhi based friend, he said that it can't work in Delhi as people will loot the water from the tank!!!!!

2 comments:

Prithi Shetty said...

Restricting visarjan to one day can only increase the risk of stampede. In Bangalore, Mobile visarjan tankers are already in use from past two years. Pretty useful for people who host Ganesha idol at home.

Happy Ganesh Chaturti to you !

Anu said...

I agree with your friend from Delhi...