The Neville D’Souza Ground: A Small Pitch, A Larger Question
· Free Press Journal
On Tuesday night the BMC general body approved changing the reservation of the Neville D’Souza football ground in Bandra Reclamation from playground to an exhibition and convention centre. The Improvements Committee had cleared it in June. The Mumbai Football Association is in the Bombay High Court; replies are due by 24 August. Officials say a new ground will be provided. That promise is now the heart of the matter.
The plot is modest: about 8,450 square metres or a little over two acres. It is a FIFA-standard turf with seating for roughly 5,000, used by MFA leagues and an estimated 8,000 to10,000 players a year. For a city that has lost other dedicated football venues, it has become the main full-sized pitch in regular use.
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It is named after Neville D’Souza, the Goan-born striker who scored a hat-trick against Australia at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics the first Asian to do so. MHADA land was allotted or leased to the football association around 2011, named in 2015, and given its current turf by MMRDA in 2018. Before that it had the familiar Reclamation story: encroachments, a boundary wall, and intervention to secure it.
The paperwork is older. The 1983 Bandra Reclamation layout reserved a larger parcel for a convention complex. DP 2034 showed this plot as a playground because a football ground already existed. MHADA wanted the original reservation restored, arguing the area lacks a dedicated convention facility and that the change can generate revenue.
Temporary sports allotments that harden into permanence are a real civic problem. So is the city’s open-space deficit: about 1.28 square metres of public open space per person. A booked, floodlit turf used by children and clubs does not come back easily. “A new ground will be made available” is a sentence Mumbai has heard before.
The convention-space claim is weaker when set against what already exists nearby. Jio World Convention Centre in BKC has 15,000 sq m of exhibition halls and 10,000 sq m of convention halls, plus a ballroom and meeting rooms many times this plot’s size, in a precinct built for events. Nesco in Goregaon is larger still. Whether Bandra Reclamation specifically needs another hall is a planning preference; whether Mumbai lacks convention space is a different question.
MHADA’s claim is real. So is this pitch. The only fair sequence is a comparable ground first, change of use later. In Mumbai, the reverse usually means the pitch disappears and the promise remains.
Ankieta Kothari is the founder of The Bombay Blueprint, a public platform chronicling Mumbai’s architecture, heritage, and evolving urban landscape.