The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) Mumbai Board has collected about Rs 324 crore through premium money by permitting redevelopment projects on its layout, said a senior official. The premium money collected is from the year 2017 till June 2020. The housing authority approved 118 redevelopment projects received from various developers.
Vinod Ghosalkar Chairman of Mumbai Building Repairs and Redevelopment Board said, "MHADA has been given the status of planning authority for the redevelopment of buildings on its layout in 2018 by the state government. This enabled no separate permission from BMC is required for the redevelopment of buildings on MHADA owned layouts. Hence, the premium money which was to be deposited with BMC now remains with the board only."
MHADA has 56 housing colonies on 114 layouts in the suburbs of Mumbai.
In 2017, MHADA came up with a policy decision allowing developers to give extra houses or pay premium money in exchange for obtaining No Objection Certificate (NOC) for carrying out the redevelopment project. After which the developers largely opted to pay premium money instead of giving the houses. Interestingly, though MHADA was able to collect crores of rupees in its account, and its housing stock reduced. As a consequence, the Mumbai board of MHADA failed to call the lottery for houses in past. Despite receiving lakhs of applications from interested homebuyers due to less housing stock the MHADA Mumbai board failed to carry out any big lottery for houses to meet the demand.
