Mumbai, July 21: After a year long delay, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority(MHADA) has now initiated the document verification process of winners of housing lottery draw called for Mill Workers.
Though 3,894 houses lottery draw was conducted in March 2020, the state housing authority was unable to handover the possession of these flats to the beneficiaries.
This was because of the existing stay order put by the Monitoring committee formed by the Bombay High Court following a case filed by a few mill workers over duplication of allotment of houses by MHADA.
A senior MHADA official, who did not wish to be named said, " We have requested the committee to uplift the stay order. All due process will be followed. Meanwhile, we are carrying out the verification process so to save time in later stage if stay is removed."
Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray held the lottery draw of houses, located in --Shrinivas Mill (544 houses), Bombay Dyeing Mill (720 houses) and Bombay Dyeing Spring Mill (2,630 houses) for mill workers. Wherein he had appealed to mill workers to not sell their rightful flats and leave Mumbai. Interestingly the 2020 lottery draw was held after four years of waiting period. As the previous lottery was held in 2013 and 2016.
As part of verification process now MHADA is sending notices to 2020 Mill houses winners asking them to submit documents proving their eligiblity. Generally after conducting the housing lottery draw this is the first step towards giving the allotment of houses but due to prevailing stay orders all process were stalled. Now since MHADA has started the verification procedure several beneficiaries are happy that at least the process in that direction has been initiated.
The 3,894 lottery houses in three mills are comprising of 225 square feet area. The eligible beneficiaries will pay Rs 9.50 lakh (construction cost) so to own the said house. About 1,74,036 applications were submitted by mill workers and their descendants for this 2020 housing lottery draw, still many are in queue, therefore the government had assured that a housing schemes to accommodate alll will be planned.
