“He now says there is not enough FSI potential on the plot, a fact that he concealed from us before,” said Parab a resident of the Low Income Group (LIG) colony. This prompted Parab, president of the Pant Nagar citizens’ forum comprising a total of 136 buildings, to seek an alternative: self-redevelopment.
Now, 25 other buildings, each over 50 years, have unanimously decided to go in for self-redevelopment.
“But there is no way out for the few of us as we have already entered into an agreement with the builder. We, however, want to ensure that others don’t suffer the same fate,” Parab said.
The residents of the 25 other buildings have appointed an architect to study the FSI potential of the plot and draw up the designs and a solicitor to take care of the legal agreement.
The next step would be to appoint a contractor to construct homes for them on part of the plot. The remainder of the plot along with its potential FSI will be auctioned to a highest corporate bidder. And the money will be used to cover the construction cost as well as for generating the corpus amount required to meet the residents’ outgoings for the next few years.
As per their plans, each resident will get more than double the area of the existing flats along with a handsome sum as corpus. On the other hand, those from the 13 Middle Income Group buildings at Pant Nagar who recently vacated their flats after awarding the redevelopment to a private developer will end up with barely 20 per cent area more in the new flat and just a fourth of the corpus that will be generated by their LIG counterparts.
The self-redevelopment project had its genesis in an idea advocated by Chandrashekhar Prabhu, housing activist and former president of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA). The concept is promoted by several others like the Kamala Raheja college of Architecture, Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) and the Indian Institute of Architects (IIA).
Prabhu had surveyed 65 redeveloped buildings to find that 90 per cent of the residents do not continue to stay in the redeveloped buildings. Some straightaway sell their flats to the developer or eventually do so due to the delay in the project. Many others gradually shift further north as they are unable to bear the higher property tax and other outgoings.
“Developers promise the moon and residents get carried away,” said Prabhu, adding that the best feature about self-redevelopment is that it secures the flat for the original residents.
Also, in cases where there is more than one building on the plot, residents don’t have to shift to transit accommodation. The new buildings can be built on the vacant space between the existing buildings, which are later demolished.
The first society that decided to test waters with this concept a couple of years ago was Sahakar Nagar 1 at Chembur. About 300 residents decided to be the first in the city to rebuild their homes on their ’terms and conditions”.
“We had seen residents from other buildings in the locality vacating their homes after developers promised to redevelop their homes.
But not a brick has been laid till date.
That is when we decided that we did not want to be at the mercy of builders,” said resident Sanjay Shitole, secretary of one of the 26 buildings that have come together for this project, likely to be completed in two years.
Two years since then, about 200 row houses in the nearby Sahakar Nagar II and 11 buildings from Sahakar Nagar III have decided to jump into the fray.
Several others like Post and Telegraph Colony in Andheri, Jawahar Nagar and Siddharth Nagar in Goregaon are also choosing this model over handing over their homes to private developers.
Sounding a note of caution, Rupali Gupte from CRIT admits that this may not be the ideal process as there are a lot of teething problems. “Unless there is a consensus amongst the members, it is very difficult to com plete the project. But at the end of the day, this method gives members a complete say in the design of their homes. Also, without compromising on their open spaces, residents reap the profit that normally goes to the builder,” she said.
“This option ensures that residents are not left high and dry,” said Uday Wavikar, secretary of the Consumer Court Advocates Association. Wavikar says that most developers would want that original residents sell their flats outright so that they get to sell the new flats to fresh buyers. “Several builders promise bigger areas and corpus amount but a common technique used to drive away residents is by stopping the payment for their alternative ac commodation mid-way,” he said.
URL: http://epaper.indianexpress.com/artMailDisp.aspx?article=26_03_2008_521_005&typ=1&pub=320