Cong-NCP Dharavi showcase touches less than 1 per cent of target

And as the remaining 99.4 per cent of beneficiary households prepare to wait longer for their promised homes, the Shiv Sena-BJP combine has found a stick to beat the Congress with: Not only has the Dharavi Redevelopment Project been in gestation for two decades, it has also been 10 years since the Slum Redevelopment Scheme was suspended in Dharavi. That scheme, a flagship of the previous Sena-BJP government in the 1990s, was put in abeyance in Asia’s largest shanty-town to ensure that an unplanned rash of small buildings does not come in the way of the planned redevelopment of the entire 240-hectare sprawl. And what the Congress-NCP is keen to flaunt as an achievement is exactly what the project aimed to end — piecemeal redevelopment in a potential real estate goldmine.

Shiv Sena’s Rahul Shewale, the Lok Sabha MP from the Mumbai South Central constituency in which Dharavi falls, told The Indian Express that the Congress-NCP government had finally succeeded in completing a tiny patch of slum redevelopment, something the Sena-BJP had initiated in the 1990s. “The state government’s approach is entirely wrong,” Shewale said. “The government should ideally first determine for an entire sector the list of residents who are eligible for free housing and those not. They should be moved into transit accommodation en masse and then the entire area should be redeveloped.”

Shewale said the Shiv Sena would stay steadfast on its promise of giving slumdwellers 400 sq ft homes, 100 sq ft more than the Congress-NCP’s tenements. The additional 100 sq ft, no doubt, are a tantalising election-time promise for Dharavi’s millions.

In 2004, the Congress-NCP government took a decision to put an end to the Nineties-style slum redevelopment schemes in Dharavi. These schemes typically comprised a few hundred or fewer shanty-owners forming a society and tying up with builders who would erect one building to rehouse the slumdwellers, another for sale in the market. The comprehensive revamp plan aimed to transform the area and put it on the global tourist map with about 59,000 families rehoused in high-rise apartments.

Barring a few exceptions, proposed SRA schemes in Dharavi were simply put on hold to make way for the mega revamp.

Sachin Ahir, NCP legislator and minister of state for housing, said this single building is still a victory for the government. “It may be said that the state government’s Dharavi revamp plan is also bringing about piecemeal development like there was earlier, but there is a difference. We have given one entire sector to the state housing authority so there is some planning. This one building that has come up is significant because it now instills some confidence about the Dharavi Redevelopment Project among people.”

The credibility factor, sorely missing thanks to a series of false starts, was now established, Ahir said. “So that way, this is one step ahead in the entire plan.”

Ahead of the local municipal elections in Mumbai in 2012, and with the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections of 2014 in mind, the state government had given the mandate of redeveloping Sector 5 (of the five sectors in Dharavi) to the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA). The area demarcated as Sector 5 had the fewest encumbrances by way of opposing slumdwellers, commercial and industrial units, and with MHADA actually owning a sizeable portion of the land to be redeveloped, the government intended to show some activity on the project.

“The idea was to complete the first building well before elections so that the Congress-NCP government can hand over keys to the first few beneficiaries. The MHADA chief had given an assurance to the chief minister that it will be done. However, we received the Union Aviation Ministry’s clearance to build 18 floors very late and that threw the schedule off-track,” a senior MHADA official said.
While the first building with three wings is now nearly complete, the construction of the second building in Sector 5, planned on a site close to the first, is still to even begin, awaiting crucial clearances. For the other four sectors, there is still a long way to go before any construction starts.

Satish Gavai, chief executive officer at MHADA, said the agency will soon get an occupation certificate and that the families identified will get possession of their flats soon. “We should be able to hand over the keys within the next one month,” Gavai said. The authority has so far identified 112 families from Dharavi’s Shatabdi Nagar slum, which has nearly 800 tenements, as eligible.