It was in the 1970’s that the Government of Maharashtra had planned to reclaim the vast area of land from Raj Bhavan to Haji Ali and construct skyscrapers making the area into a concrete jungle. Shri B A Desai, along with some prominent citizens of Mumbai like Shri Rajni Patel, Shri B K Karanjia, Mr Murli Deora, Mr R H Dastoor, Mr Ajit Malkani formed "Save Breach Candy Committee" and under its auspices of led protest marches and also held a cricket match to stop the land reclamation. This movement led to the creation of the Malabar Hill Citizens’ Forum.

The movement was successful and the reclamation was stopped. But in the meantime, several builders who had an eye on the substantial reclaimed land on which they wanted to build skyscrapers, pestered Shri B A Desai for the land. The area was already being used for nefarious activities like illicit breweries and was a smuggler's den. But Shri B A Desai, in his capacity as MLA, resisted all these efforts, and at his instance, the said land was handed over to the Malabar Hill Citizens’ Forum in 1985. From a stinking junkyard-cum-smugglers paradise with a surface worse than the lunar surface, the Malabar Hill Citizens’ Forum worked hard to develop the land into a glorious park-cum-garden-cum-sports centre.

Have a look below at how the land looked, before the Malabar Hill Citizens’ Forum developed it into the beautiful Priyadarshini Park and Sports Complex as we know it now.