Wednesday morning was coldest in Oct since 2010 Eye on BMC polls: State races to create 1,500 WiFi hotspots by Jan

Cool winds from the northern parts of the country helped the city record its coldest October morning in the past seven years on Wednesday.

While the Santacruz weather station, representative of Mumbai, recorded 18.8 degrees Celsius as the minimum temperature, which was 4.3 degree Celsius below normal, Colaba recorded 22.4 degrees Celsius, representative of south Mumbai, which was 2 degrees Celsius below normal. These were overnight readings taken at 5.30am on Wednesday.

The lowest night temperature for Mumbai in the past decade was recorded on October 19, 2007 (18.7 degrees Celsius) and the alltime-low night temperature was recorded on October 30, 1952 (16.7 degrees Celsius).

With the Mumbai civic polls scheduled early next year, all major public places in the city are likely to turned into WiFi zones by mid-January, according to an ambitious plan drawn up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led Maharashtra government.

The state government has set a target of completing the first phase of the project — WiFi hotspots at 500 locations — by November 15 itself. Overall, the city will have 1,500 WiFi hotspots. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis recently sanctioned Rs194 crore for the project’s first phase.

According to the plan, residents will be able to use WiFi free of cost for a maximum download limit of 100 megabytes (MB) a day a user, or for 30 minutes a day, whichever is earlier. All e-governance mobile applications of the BMC, state government and Union government will be available all day for free, unlimited use at these hotspots.

The officer probing the mangrove destruction by actor Kapil Sharma to make way for illegal extensions was transferred on Tuesday. The former assistant conservator of forest, state mangrove cell, Makarand Ghodke, had been investigating 60 similar violations along the one-kilometre stretch near Kapil Sharma’s bungalow at Andheri (West). An official from the state government told HT that several posts in the mangrove cell across the state were rejigged with some designations eliminated.