It took a year of elaborate efforts to restore the Bandra railway station building to its original glory. But it took only a few hundred commuters and just three weeks to deface it.

The station, one of the oldest on the western lines and a Grade-I heritage structure, was approved for renovation by the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee on December 2007, provided that its style architecture was preserved.

After a painstaking restoration work, the doors of the restored station building was thrown open to the citizens on May 7. The recreated look, complete with red-tiled roofs, intricate eaves, fine woodwork pillars, high-arched walls, iron windows and large doors to look exactly the way it would have when it was built in the 1880s, cost Rs 40 lakh.

Today, even while the old-world beauty glows from the outside, messy red splotches of paan are already coating the whitewashed walls of the brand-new edifice within and graffiti is appearing on the woodwork.

Abha Narain Lambha, conservation architect under whose supervision the heritage structure was restored, rues the absence of appreciation from the public. “We did the best we could to restore the station building, but if citizens continue to disregard public property like this, fewer professionals are going to come forward to take up such projects,” she says.

Lambha thinks while civic awareness is needed, levying a penalty may be the most effective and immediate means of putting an end to the nuisance. “If a few offenders are pulled up and fined publicly, others will check themselves,” she says.

... contd.