MG Road to be car-free zone on New Year's Eve?

Gurugram: With few to go for New Year's Eve, the Gurugram police have begun preparations for maintaining law and order in the area. Besides deploying a huge force of 1,500 officials, there are plans to make MG road a car-free zone from 6 pm to 1 am on December 31.

There are plans to divert the vehicles coming from Mehrauli-Badarpur road towards Golf Course road and for those from National Highway-8 towards Sector-29.

The parking facility for the vehicles is expected to be provided at the Leisure valley ground. Meetings with the pub owners have also begun on the issues of discussing timings for the closure of their business after welcoming 2018.

There are over 300 high scale restaurants in Gurugram that have resulted in it becoming one of the most preferred places for food, beverage and entertainment options among citizens of the national Capital region. However, with more than 150 pubs and bars, it has been MG road that for long has been frequented by the party-goers.

MG Road is one of busiest roads in the city where traffic management on a routine basis seems to be a big challenge. However, on big occasions like new years' eve, there are over two lakh vehicles that descend at Mall Mile.

Having faced various financial challenges this year, the owners of the pubs want to bring in favourable packages so that this time the footfall is higher than the previous years.

In a major lapse in law and order, thousands of people had thronged the MG road on the new years eve of 2012 and there were large incidents of molestation that were reported.

The year 2017 has also been difficult for law enforcement officials. Despite having three police stations guarding the posh locality, this year there have been brazen crimes of culpable homicide, molestations, sex trade to even shootouts inside one of the malls.

Further, drunken drivers continue to pose a challenge to law and order situation at MG road even as there has been the deployment of personnel by the Gurugram police to improve the conditions at Mall Mile.

Not only the police personnel have to meet the challenge of drunken rash driving but also of the altercations by the drunken drivers, that often have the long confrontation with the police officials, when fined for the offence. Twenty four teams of Gurugram police have been formed to ensure that there is no drunken driving during the new year's eve.