Leader of opposition Devendra Fadnavis and Pravin Darekar met RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das to urge lifting of curbs put on state and district central cooperative banks on Thursday.
Fadnavis requested Governer Das to ensure that finance provided for self redevelopment schemes is kept out of the purview of commercial real estate.
In a letter to the Governor, the former CM addressed the issues real estate sector and the residents are facing right now and wrote, "More often than not the developer mismanages the work of redevelopment and hence cannot complete the project on time. Most of the times the residents of the societies under redevelopment face harrowing times due to the delay in redevelopment work and also the fact that the developer doesn't pay them the rent amounts on time. The discomfort the residents face due to all these factors and also the hesitation in relocating to some other structure for the time being makes them the reluctant participants of any redevelopment project and they continue to live in these dilapidated buildings risking their own lives and welfare of their loved ones."
He added that there are almost 5,800 redevelopment projects in Mumbai which have been lying in some degree of incompleteness and the residents of such housing societies, a lot of whom are senior citizens, have been rendered homeless in-spite of having owned one themselves.
Check the full letter here:
The government has appointed the Maharashtra State Co-operative Bank as the apex bank for the DCCBs and the Co-operative Credit Structure in Maharashtra as Nodal Agency for successful implementation of the Self Redevelopment Scheme in the State of Maharashtra through DCCB's which also includes providing finance for the projects. Fadnavis added that more and more co-operative housing societies have adopted the path of Self Redevelopment rather than redevelopment through builder or developer.
"Members of co-op. housing societies are benefiting by way of getting additional carpet area and corpus due to extra FSI benefit. This will also help to boost the entire economy. The government will get sizeable revenue from the project as it is estimated that near about 30% to 40% of project cost arc part of government revenue i.e various premiums, taxes and duties etc," he said.
Parliament in September passed amendments to the Banking Regulation Act to bring cooperative banks under the supervision of the RBI, a move aimed at protecting the interest of depositors.
The Banking Regulation (Amendment) Bill, 2020, which replaced an ordinance that was promulgated on June 26, was passed by a voice vote in the Rajya Sabha. The amendment had received approval from the Lok Sabha on September 16.
The bill, which came in the backdrop of the PMC Bank scam, sought to strengthen cooperative banks by increasing their professionalism, enabling access to capital, improving governance and ensuring sound banking through the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
There are 1,482 urban cooperative banks and 58 multi-state cooperative banks having about 8.6 crore depositors with total savings deposit of about Rs 4.85 lakh crore.
The decision assumes significance in the wake of scams in cooperative banks, including the Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank, affecting lakhs of customers who are facing difficulty in withdrawing their money due to restrictions imposed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
The RBI had placed regulatory curbs on PMC Bank on September 23, 2019, after finding out certain financial irregularities and misreporting of loans given to real estate developer HDIL.
