Complaints Increase Over Slum Scheme
Pamela Raghunath
Mumbai: The slum rehabilitation scheme, much touted as a unique way of providing free houses to Mumbai’s more than six million slum inhabitants, is now being described as a profit-making plan for builders, bureaucrats and politicians.
Everyone seems to have a stake in the scheme except the poor slum dweller himself even as sprawling spaces occupied by them are being gobbled up by some crafty builders under the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme.
Under this scheme, first announced by the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government in 1996 to give free houses to one million slum dwellers, a builder was allowed to approach any slum cluster to redevelop after getting the consent of 70 per cent of the slum’s residents. He could then raze the tenements, provide temporary accommodation to those whose huts have been cleared and construct the housing units free of cost for them. In return, he gets to build on the remaining land an equivalent number of houses, usually high-rises, and sell at market rates. Looking at the present real estate prices, the profits are enormous even after building free houses.
However, in recent months, several complaints have been made pointing out to a builder-bureaucrat nexus.
Illegal payments
Apparently, a raid conducted last year by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in a bungalow belonging to former municipal officer and now a redevelopment consultant Jayant Joshi revealed a diary listing payments totalling more than Rs10 million (Dh800,000) made to officials in a year for a western suburb slum redevelopment project.
A recent Hindustan Times exposé revealed that the diary listed 30 payments to officials in the SRA, Collector’s office, the municipal corporation and a local court. Payments ranged from Rs5,000 (Dh416) to local police to Rs4.5 million (Dh375,000) to a SRA CEO.
The flaw in the scheme relates to how builders use all kinds of methods to obtain the consent of slum dwellers and how the list of slum dwellers is inflated so that they build more saleable flats.
Often, non-existent names are added to the list as being residents of a slum colony. The ACB raid encouraged nearly 200 complaints being addressed to various state agencies.
However, the ACB’s request to the government for a special investigating team to unearth the irregularities in the SRA was turned down, says the newspaper, and instead a single man, retired bureaucrat Bal Kumar Agarwal, was appointed by the government to look into 187 complaints of corruption in the SRA scheme.
URL- http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/02/28/10107621.html