Shirish Patel, one of the pioneer Directors of City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra | Screenshot via iihschannel/YouTube
Shirish Patel, one of the pioneer Directors of City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO) was with the company right from its inception in 1970, holding the prestigious designation of ‘Director of Planning and Works’ for close to a decade till Navi Mumbai came into being.
CIDCO was established in 1970 to create a city across the harbour to decongest Mumbai and the city’s pioneer planners were J B D’souza, Shirish Patel and Charles Correa along with Pravina Mehta.
Arun Mhaisalkar, former CIDCO officer who retired as Chief Architect and planner, said Patel formulated the entire master plan of Navi Mumbai city and the blueprint of the city’s drainage system. Mhaisalkar who retired from CIDCO in 2004, said, “Patel was my mentor. I am extremely saddened with this shocking news.”
He added that visionaries like Patel, Correa and the members of the Planning Committee formulated a very interesting conceptual structure of the twin city we call Navi Mumbai, keeping in mind the perils of mono centric form of city like Mumbai. “The basic form and structure of New Bombay evolved with the circular and the intense development of CBD around the Vaghivali Lake – the geographic centre of Navi Mumbai and with four transport corridors of Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) emanating from the centre towards Thane, Nhava-Sheva, Taloja and Panvel,” he said.
The Vaghivali Island has now been transformed into the upcoming Navi Mumbai international airport. Mhaiskar said Patel’s other unique contribution was the master plan for the drainage. “There are no floods in Navi Mumbai as it often happens in Mumbai,” Mhaisalkar added.
After the plan of Navi Mumbai was implemented, Patel continued to be associated with CIDCO as a consultant.
Vidyadhar Pathak, who also retired in the year 2004 from Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) as Principal Chief, Town and Country Planning Division, worked with Patel for close to six years while he was with CIDCO. “He was a well-known structural engineer and urban planner in Mumbai. In 1965, he authored an article where he first mentioned about the development of New Bombay as it was called back then. In 1970, the responsibility of planning and developing the city was entrusted to him, Charles Correa and Pravina Mehta. Besides planning Navi Mumbai, he was also very concerned about slums, Dharavi and chawls in Mumbai and regularly contributed his articles to EPW magazine,” Pathak said.
The latest work of Patel has been a two-volume book that he compiled named ‘6 metros’. Pathak had collaborated with Patel for many other projects, he said. Pathak is not sure what Patel felt about the plan of the international airport in Navi Mumbai. “I know Correa was agitated with the plan of the airport but Patel’s views were not clear to me but I am assuming he was not in favour as he never actively expressed anything about the idea of the airport,” Pathak added.
NatConnect Foundation Director and environmentalist B N Kumar said that Patel was the great visionary who, along with Correa, conceived the idea of Navi Mumbai as a planned and self-financing city, “Hats off to the planner who questioned the BMC as to what happens to the east of Mumbai and beyond the Thane Creek and that was the planned city idea germinated,” said Kumar. “As I always say, CIDCO was a good planner in the initial days of planning from the 1970s and mid-1990s, but of late the corporation wants to gobble up all wetlands and destroy mangroves under the guise of infrastructure development,”Kumar pointed out.
“There is a lot that we have to learn from the meticulous planning and ideas of Patel and a case study on his life and works should be taught to our urban planners of today. Patel believed in low-density housing to uniform FSI with greenery and open spaces. But unfortunately the green cover and open spaces are rare commodities now. We will miss you Shirishbhai”.
