FPJ Edit | Patra Chawl: A sordid saga of greed and graft

FPJ Edit | Patra Chawl: A sordid saga of greed and graft

FPJ EditorialUpdated: Monday, February 28, 2022, 09:23 AM IST
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The Patra Chawl redevelopment case is a sordid saga of greed, corruption and betrayal that is being played out in hundreds of ageing housing societies across the city. These British-era barracks spread over 47 acres in Goregaon (W) house 672 residents who opted for redevelopment and moved out of their 265-sq-ft tenements in 2007, hoping to get homes twice the size in three years. Fourteen years later, their flats are yet to be built and the builder has stopped paying them the rent. However, the sale component – three 24-storey towers

– is ready. Int he interim, 200of the Patra Chawl tenement owners have expired. Strangely, the Real Estate Regulation Act (RERA) does not protect the original tenants in such projects. The residents blame their own managing committee members who sold them to the builder, the venal system and meddling politicians. Last week, the CM re-launched the redevelopment process and promised that they would get their houses in three years. The inauguration took place in the presence of top MVA leaders such as NCP chief Sharad Pawar, finance minister Ajit Pawar, revenue minister Balasaheb Thorat and housing minister Jitendra Awhad.

In 2007, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority(MHADA) gave the redevelopment contract of Patra Chawl to Guruashish Developers – a subsidiary of HDIL – whose promoters are Sarang and Rakesh Wadhwan. Guruashish was also supposed to hand over 306 additional tenements to MHADA for distribution through its lottery system. It did neither. Instead, it sold land parcels and FSI from the project to eight other builders for Rs 1,034 crore. It then went into insolvency in 2017. A 2018 report by the then housing secretary Sanjay Kumar found that an error in the calculation of the Patra Chawl area caused the state aloss of Rs 474 crore. Yet, it was only in March 2018 that MHADA filed an FIR against Guruashish. In February 2020, Pravin Raut – one of the directors in the firm along with Sarang and Rakesh Wadhawan –

was arrested by the EOW of the Mumbai Police. Sarang Wadhawan was arrested by the EOW in September of the same year. The Wadhawans are also the prime accused in the Rs 4,300 crore PMC Bank scam case. The plot thickened when the ED questioned Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut's wife Varsha last year in connection with the PMC Bank case and her purported links with Pravin Raut's wife. Sanjay Raut has written to Vice President Venkaiah Naidu alleging that he, his relatives and friends were being harassed by the ED. He had earlier alleged that BJP leader Mohit Kambhoj siphoned off money from the PMC Bank to buy plots in Patra Chawl. Earlier this month, Pravin Raut was arrested by the ED which alleged that he received Rs 95 crore in his bank account in 2010 under the "guise of sale of equity and land deal though the company was not able to complete the project and had not generated any income".

Real estate is at the root of half the dodgy deals in the state. Manohar Joshi had to quit as Maharashtra CM following allegations that he had favoured his son-in-law in a Pune plot allocation. One of the main reasons why he lost the Mumbai Central Parliamentary seat was because Marathi residents of Dadar felt betrayed by him in redevelopment deals. The Patrawala Chawl case, by no means unique, shows that the housing policy is a reverse Robin Hood process. There is just no political will to createal and bank in Mumbai for affordable housing. Even well-meaning laws have failed. The Urban Land (Ceiling & Regulation) Act of 1976 allowed state governments to acquire vacant land for public housing in urban centres, if it exceeded the ceiling per individual (500 sq mtrs in Maharashtra).The state government repealed the Actin November 2007 saying “the basic purpose of the Act was not fulfilled”; big landowners were able to circumvent the law and the land scarcity it created was leading to higher real estate prices. The MHADA has failed miserably and made the situation worse by gifting away prime plots in the city to trusts floated by politicians. Such is the housing situation in the maximum city that it takes the savings of both father and son to buy a 2BHK flat in a decent locality. Even after this, the quality of construction is not guaranteed. The Slum Rehabilitation Act of 1995, under which free houses are to be given to slum dwellers by exploiting the excess land, is implemented in such a way that the SRA is a by word for corruption. The owners of defunct textile mills were supposed to surrender one-third of the mill land to the municipality for gardens and parks but in the end the city got a pittance as the rule was slyly modified to read one-third of the 'open space' in the mill land. Not only that, there are rampant FSI violations in the constructions which have come up on mill lands. Today, the commercial complex that has come up on the mill lands at Lower Parel makes Nariman Point look like a paradise. Pickup anything to do with real estate in Mumbai and more often than not there’s a scam in it. However, the only time politicians have had to pay for it was in the case of Adarsh.

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