JOIN USIf you’ve driven in and around Manyata Tech Park in Nagawara, you can’t really miss a red-coloured no-parking board proclaiming ‘Vehicles parked here will be deflated’.
Mind you, this is not just a proclamation; people who have parked their cars near these boards have had the tyres deflated.
This board has not been erected by the traffic police but by the private security agency of the Manyata Tech Park.
Most tech parks across the City have strict rules when it comes to parking within their premises. But such harsh action for wrong parking seems to be exclusive only to Manyata Tech Park.
Each company in Manyata has a designated parking place and the employees too have separate parking spaces. The security officials of Manyata confess that they were forced to erect such a board after cases of random parking by cab drivers entering the tech park, who refused to comply with the rules of parking.
A senior security officer of Manyata explains, “There are close to 50,000 cars driving in and out of Manyata on a daily basis and random parking inside the premises triggers a traffic jam which stretches half way onto the Outer Ring Road until the Hebbal Flyover. This board is intended as a deterrence. We don’t immediately deflate the tyres. Those parked in the wrong places are first warned and if they don’t heed even after repeated requests, the tyres are deflated.”
Manyata Tech Park, like many other tech parks, in the City, falls under the special economic zone.
The tech park also acts as a thoroughfare to many residential areas within the
tech park and connects to areas like Hegdenagar and beyond, which makes it a public property.
This means that the government can intervene when necessary. When asked why the traffic police has not regulated or looked into such a board being erected on the premises or stopped cars from being deflated, B Dayananda, additional commissioner of police, says, “Manyata is a private space and we have no say in what they do inside that space.
We can look at anything happening on public roads but not private spaces,” he reasons. He adds, “We haven’t got any complaint from anybody in this regard, so what should we act against?”
No other tech park across the City seems to have such an unreasonable way of tackling illegal parking within their premises.
More than the management, people working in these tech parks think that providing ample parking space and regulating the same would be the best option rather than resorting to extreme measures.
Bagmane Tech Park in CV Raman Nagar, International Tech Park in
Whitefield and International Tech Park Bangalore just to mention a few have well-planned parking spaces.
The Velankani Tech Park in Electronic City, for instance, has a separate
parking space for the visitors and for the employees as well.
Apurva, an employee with a company in Velankani, shares, “Nobody is allowed
to enter the tech park without an identity proof and visitors have to get a
special pass to enter. There are separate parking spaces
for visitors, which are monitored by security guards posted at every gate.”
Sushma, an employee of Manyata, is extremely
unhappy with the idea of deflating tyres. She thinks that it amounts to damaging private property.
“I saw the board and I laughed. It is sad that people can stoop to such low levels in the name of regulating parking,” she sums up.