Bhopal, April 29 -- Despite repeated efforts over the last two decades, the city administration has failed to relocate sawmills from the Bharat Talkies area of the state capital, leading to traffic bottlenecks, fire hazards, and now delays in the Metro rail project.
Though relocation efforts started after a massive fire in the early 2020s, the most serious of them came during the Congress rule in January 2020. Land at Chandpur was earmarked, a boundary was built, and a list of 86 saw mill operators was compiled under the MSME Cluster Development Programme. But the sawmills simply refused to budge after a change in government.
The consequences have been deadly; various fire incidents reported since then have sounded the alarm over the thre...