Freedom Park project breaks all chains

Freedom project breaks all chains
BCC Plans ‘Quality’ Park In Barren Stretch of Central Jail
The Times of India

Bangalore: It’s emancipation time finally for the Freedom Park project, slated to come up on the now-barren stretch of the erstwhile Central Jail. This, despite the glitches like time, money, land and permission.

For a while now, speculation among many city-based architects was rife that the Freedom Park project had stumbled upon an obstacle course because “land sharks were eyeing the vast tract of prime land’’. But some 80,000 cubic feet of earth excavated from the work on the underpass at West of Chord Road and grade separator at Rajajinagar entrance are being stacked for the Freedom Park project.

Apparently, the earth in this underpass area has been certified as of “unusually good quality”. The soil has been stacked for a massive mound for an amphitheatre which forms part of the plan. The soil is being stacked because some aesthetic beauty lending species of plants are supposed to be planted at Central Jail Park. City-based architects Nisha Mathew and Soumitro Ghosh, whose design blueprints were accepted for remodelling, might have won national and international awards, but concrete work per se is yet to take off.

Explains BCC special commissioner Subash Chandra: “The plan was approved by the BCC council and also by the horticulture department. The proposal has now gone to the government.’’ The delay, he explains, was because of roadblocks — the proposed BDA flyover’s (at Ananda Rao Circle) ramp in the blueprint plan was extending into the park, so an alternative had to be found. “Besides, we realised that parking space on the surface level had to be looked into all anew. The mandate is to create lung space,’’ Subash Chandra added.

The new park is slated to have an information corridor with touch-screen galleries, a museum, a permanent water sheet, a musical fountain, and former mayor C.M. Nagaraj had also promised “the tallest tower”. But a suggestion that the architects had made, of retaining the barracks with prisoners’ footprints, has been ignored.