MHADA sets sights on 386 hectares of govt land for affordable housing

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SS Zende, Vice President and Chief Executive Officer at MHADA, said, “We have personally surveyed all the plots and sent a proposal to the state revenue department. Even if the government approves to grant us 60 per cent of the land that we have demanded, we will be in a position to create a sizeable stock of affordable housing in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.”

The concept of affordable housing has been losing steam within Mumbai city with MHADA’s land bank rapidly shrinking. The housing board has a large tract of land within Mumbai, but about 1,500 hectares is occupied by its 105 housing colonies, and most of the remainder is encroached upon.

Vijay Lahane, chief officer of MHADA’s Konkan board which oversees the authority’s housing development in the districts of Thane, Palghar, Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, said, “Now, greenfield development in Mumbai is over. The only chance of creating affordable housing in Mumbai is through the redevelopment of MHADA’s existing colonies.”

“There is a great demand for housing closer to Mumbai, so we have decided to concentrate on building low-cost houses in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region,” he added.

Lahane further said that the authority had initially surveyed 55 vacant government plots in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, and identified 23 of them as suitable for housing development.

“We discarded those plots which were located in hilly areas, were not easily accessible or had problems in basic infrastructure services such as water supply, sewerage and so on. If the government agrees to hand over this land to MHADA, we will mostly focus on building houses for the economically weaker sections and lower-income groups,” Lahane said.

The mix could be about 50 percent for the economically weaker sections, 30 percent for the lower-income groups and 20 percent for the middle-income group category.

MHADA has requested the state revenue department to hand over the plots to the authority at a nominal fee instead of the government’s usual policy of allotting land by the ready reckoner rate, so that the cost of the houses can be kept minimal.

manasi.phadke@expressindia.com