MUMBAI, July 30 -- Jasmina Khanna notes the countless times she has had to be lifted in her wheelchair to find a comfortable spot on a beach or in a garden. "It's a matter of my dignity," said Khanna, who is wheelchair-bound due to cerebral palsy. And this, she says, is what happens at Five Gardens, a heritage enclave and green haven in the Dadar Parsi Colony. "The ride on the footpath is like a roller-coaster ride for me." Khanna was speaking while presenting her disability audit on Five Gardens on Tuesday. She was accompanied by Sanket Khadilkar, her physiotherapist and co-founder of the NGO Access to Hope, and other people with other disabilities. As part of the audit, the group did a walkthrough, to assess how disability friendly the precinct was. "We encountered our first problem as soon as we got to Five Gardens; there were no ramps, or the ramps were unusable," said Khadilkar. "The footpaths themselves, made of basalt stone, have uneven surfaces, so much so that Jasmina's wheelchair would often come to a dead stop, and the only thing stopping her from falling, face first, was her belt," he said. Appointed by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to conduct the audit last September, the NGO surveyed the ramps, footpath surfaces, obstructions, bollards, interiors of the gardens, and public toilets, and evaluated them against the central government's Harmonised Guidelines & Standards for Universal Accessibility in India, 2021. Mitesh Shah, who walks with the help of calipers and crutches, said that navigating the footpaths here was like a "trek". "One of the slopes to the garden was so steep, as opposed to the guideline of a 1:12 gradient, I had to pull myself up with the gates of the garden to climb it." The group found several obstructions on the footpaths too, from bus stops, tree guards without any warning, lamp posts, electric poles, signboards and hawkers. This, Khanna said, makes public infrastructure unsuitable not only for people with disabilities but also for the elderly, pregnant women, mothers with strollers, etc. Khanna's report said the gardens themselves were difficult to navigate. "The interior of the gardens have grass, small uprooted pavers, or plain gravel, difficult terrain to manoeuvre for persons with disabilities," it said, adding that there were no play area rides that were disability friendly. "I was once asked by a civic official why infrastructure should be made disability friendly when there are so few people who use it," she said. "But it is the opposite; when there is accessibility, the visibility of people with disabilities will quadruple." Access to Hope will soon present its findings to the BMC and suggest changes. Residents of Five Gardens, however, worry that changes would ruin the Grade III heritage features of their neighbourhood. They say they don't want things to change. "We are not against making the area disability friendly, but we do not want the beauty and character of the area harmed, especially with concrete," said Darayus Bacha, member of Mancherji Edulji Joshi Colony Residents' Association (MEJCRA). "We are fine with a ramp up to the garden, smoothening of the basalt stones where it hasn't been done, an eco-turf walking path in the gardens and a disabled friendly toilet. But concrete would ruin the beauty of the area, harm the trees and further lead to a depletion in the ground-water table," said Bacha....