Anik-Panjarpol Link Road tunnels

Eastern Freeway

MHADA

Deonar hills

Buddha Park

JJ School of Art

The project is being undertaken mainly to drive out encroachers from the hills (Photo by Sachin Haralkar)

A Buddha Park—the city’s first—will come up over the two sprawlingof theby next year.The project is being undertaken byto deter encroachers from taking over the, from which the 500-m-long tunnels were carved in Chembur’s Sahyadri Nagar. When the Freeway opened in 2013, there were few hutments. Today, they number in the hundreds, said a senior official.The Rs 10-crore tourist attraction-—whose centrepiece will be a 55-feet-tall Buddha statue made of fibre glass—will include a children’s park, a meditation centre and a jogging track, and will be an exact replica of thein Ravangla, Sikkim. Its groundbreaking ceremony was held last month and work under the first of three phases—creating an access path for earthmovers and trucks as well building a boundary wall-—has already begun.While the rest of the construction will be taken up under phase 2, the last phase will primarily involve transporting the statue from Lalbaugcha Raja in Parel, where it will be built. A MHADA official said all clearances have been sanctioned, as is Rs 3 crore for phase 1. “We have issued notices to the encroachers to vacate the area.” A separate entrance that doesn’t affect the Freeway traffic will be created.Anushakti Nagar MLA Tukaram Kate assures that the park will be ready by next year. He had accompanied a team comprising an architect, MHADA officials and a sculptor to Ravangla four months ago to gauge if its park could be replicated in Mumbai. The sculptor, Shreyash Varankar, an alumnus from, is known for his Ganpati idols. He had proposed constructing the Buddha statue with fibre glass because the material is lightweight and long-lasting.