MHADA to get BMC plot at Western India mill to build homes for laid off workers

The order, passed earlier this week by the state’s urban development department, was based on a proposal by MHADA where it expressed its inability to construct houses on its share of land from the mills considering their tiny size, ranging from 380 sqm to 1000 sqm.

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Accordingly, MHADA will now hand over its share from these plots to the BMC while the civic body will give its sprawling 3600 sqm plot in Western India Mills at Kalachowkie to the housing board.

The BMC will have to develop these tiny plots as recreation grounds and playgrounds instead of its earlier plans to have one large open space. These plots are scattered across the privately owned Mafatlal mills, Matulya mills and Victoria mills in Lower Parel, Hindustan mills in Byculla, Crown mills in Prabhadevi as well as the Maharashtra State Textile Corporation at Kalachowkie.

While the original Development Control Rules 1991 provided for sharing of the entire textile mills land between MHADA, BMC and the mill owners, in 2001, the Vilasrao Deshmukh government tweaked norms so as to allow mill owners to retain all land having mill structures on them as well as a third of the open-to-sky land.

As a result, MHADA and BMC, whose share for mill worker-public housing and open spaces respectively would have amounted to 200 acres each, ended up with merely 36 acres each. With the new arrangement, there is no land available for public housing. To date, less than 10,000 houses could be constructed for the 1.48 lakh retrenched workers’ families.

Activists say a smaller share of BMC and MHADA means less space available for public purposes.

Datta Iswalkar, from the Girini Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti, said mills such as Phoenix and Raghuvanshi were able to take advantage of loopholes in the law and get away without sharing anything with MHADA or BMC. “The recently sanctioned exchange of land was based on our demand as there was nothing MHADA could do with the small plots,” he said.

BMC’s share, that will now come to MHADA, will be clubbed with MHADA’s existing share in Western India Mills to form a plot area of over 6500 sqm for mill workers’ housing.

Iswalkar said that with little land left to rehabilitate workers within Mumbai, the rest will be accommodated in rental housing units in the periphery of Mumbai Metropolitan Region. “Fifty per cent of these units have been reserved for mill workers’ housing,” he said.