Cabinet okays redevelopment of BDD chawls.

The State cabinet on Thursday cleared the redevelopment of the 100-year-old Bombay Development Directorate (BDD) chawls in south-central Mumbai.

The State has appointed the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) as the nodal agency for the project, paving the way for a new set of guidelines for chawl redevelopment under the development control rules (DCR).

The profits arising out of redevelopment will be shared between the government and MHADA at a ratio of 70:30.

The cabinet-approved proposal has now been forwarded to a high-power committee headed by the Chief Secretary, who will decide on the question of tenement size, floor space index, and funding for the project.

In doing so, the cabinet also cancelled three circulars with regard to redevelopment projects issued by the Congress-NCP government in 1999. 'We hereby give in-principle approval to the redevelopment proposal and the building plan approval for the same,' the cabinet note reads. For the purpose of deciding the eligibility criteria for the beneficiaries, the cabinet also appointed Collector as the nodal officer.

Spread over 93 acres, the BDD project envisages giving tenants 550 sq ft homes in lieu of their current 160 sq ft tenements. Successive governments have used tenement size as a poll plank over the years, with one scoring over the other with promises of bigger units.

'The politicians just want to score a brownie point by giving a bigger unit size, the project already is the biggest beneficiary of this one-upmanship,' said a senior official.

The Rs 2,000-crore redevelopment plan was first mooted by MHADA in 2010 but it has been stuck at the proposal stage for various reasons, including lack of interest from developers and the loss of the project file in a fire at Mantralaya in 2012.

The total cost of the project has also been scaled up to Rs 10,825 crore. Officials said once the new scheme was formulated, another sub-scheme of Act 33 would be enacted to cover hundreds of structures on chawls in south-central Mumbai.

This is not the first time the State government will be extending rule 33 of the DCR to facilitate development of a property.

In the past, it formulated clause 33 (10) (AA) for the redevelopment of Dharavi; 33 (11) for the redevelopment of certain structures under the Urban Land Ceiling Act; 33(12), for projects being carried out with World-Bank assistance; and 33 (13) for development of tenements for project-affected people.

Of the 207 chawls built by the British in central Mumbai, 19 chawls are on the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT) land, while the rest are at Naigaum, Parel, Worli, and Sewri.

The BDD chawls were constructed by the British government in 1921. Each structure is home to 80 tenements of 160 sq ft. The maintenance of the chawls is at present carried out by the Public Works Department (PWD).

THE HINDU