MMRDA’s low rent housing a faraway dream for city’s poor

Almost two years after MMRDA announced its rental housing project of building five lakh rental units in five years as ‘slum prevention scheme’ for Mumbai, the project is yet to get off the ground owing to several setbacks.The latest flak comes from experts after MMRDA’s announcement last week of location clearance to 1,99,539 located in Thane and Raigad districts.

Activist Neera Adarkar says, “If you want to prevent slums in Mumbai, building rental units in far off Raigad, defeats the whole purpose.Slum-dwellers generally work as cheap labour in the city, and to expect them to go even as far as Panvel is unrealistic. MMRDA’s scheme sounds more like a move to drive the poor out of the city.”
While over 39,000 rental units have been proposed in Panvel and Karjat of Raigad District, units in Thane district are even as far as Pisavali village ahead of Kalyan and Ranjnoli, off Mumbai-Nashik highway.

Dilip Kawatkar, Project Director, MMRDA says, “The land on which units are built under this scheme has to belong to the developer, for which he gets a total floor space index (FSI) of four.