Mumbai: Chembur Gymkhana witnessed a unique protest on Sunday when several people stormed the venue of a “monsoon run” event and protested against the sponsor Tridhaatu Realty & Infra Pvt Ltd, who failed to complete the redevelopment project. The protestors were promised possession in July 2012.
Talking to The FPJ, one of the aggrieved, NA Ayyappan, on Monday said that more than a dozen people have died waiting for the bigger flats promised to them. “Several representations were made to the builder, but in vain. What is worse is that the company stopped paying rent in February 2020, which hit many of us very badly because we are retired persons,” he added.
FPJ
2009 agreement
In 2009, Swathi Cooperative Housing Society, Govandi, had signed a redevelopment agreement with Tridhaatu, which was represented by its directors Krishnan Muthukumar, Dhananjay Sandu and Pritam Chivukula. The society consisted of four buildings occupied by 78 members. Of them, 30 lived in one BHK flats and 48 owned one room kitchen units. About 100% extra space was to be given to each of the members apart from a corpus of Rs8 lakh for each of the bigger flats and Rs5 lakh for the smaller ones. Also, monthly rents of Rs30,000 and Rs20,000 were to be paid to 1BHK and 1RK members, respectively. Apart from the original members, 123 others, who had booked flats in the free sale component of the project, have also been affected. One of them, Deepa Sridhar, said “We have waited for several years. How much longer do we wait?”
When this newspaper contacted Krishnan Muthukumar aka Govind, he acknowledged the delay, but blamed the authorities for the same. He said several problems with regard to environment clearance, development control rules, etc cropped up and the company had to move the courts to get due permissions. He further said the funding was coming from HDFC Ltd and certain issues cropped up because of the merger of HDFC Bank and HDFC Ltd. These problems were finally resolved on Monday.
Claiming that rents were being paid until about three months ago, Govind underlined that work on two wings of the project was completed and the remaining project will be finished soon. “We have informed MahaRERA that we will give possession by December 2023,” he added. However, the members are sceptical about the prospect. They want the developer to prove its bonafide by first clearing the rent arrears.
