One Patra Chawl rehab building will be ready this year: MHADA to HC

The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) has told the Bombay high court that it will try to complete constructing one of the rehab buildings in the Patra Chawl redevelopment project this year against its scheduled deadline of May 2024.

In its reply filed before a division bench of justice Gautam Patel and justice Neela Gokhale on April 17, the housing authority also said that it would identify eligible tenants for receiving transit rent and arrears. A copy of the order was uploaded on Wednesday.

The HC posted the hearing on June 22.

MHADA has taken over the responsibility of completing the project after the original developer, Guruashish Constructions Limited, failed to carry out its obligations.

The court had on April 11 directed MHADA to submit an affidavit stating by when it would complete construction of the rehab component of the 47-acre redevelopment project at Siddharth Nagar, also known as Patra Chawl, in Goregaon and hand them over to the eligible tenants. The bench had also asked the authority to give a deadline for paying the transit rent and arrears to the original tenants who had given up their homes for the project.

On April 17, the HC was hearing a petition filed by a few tenants in 2019. They claimed that while 15 flat buyers in the saleable component had got relief after the HC directed MHADA to issue occupation certificates, the original tenants remained homeless.

The bench, however, dismissed an interim application filed by one of the flat buyers. The applicant had urged the HC to decide if MHADA permitting the developer to encash the saleable component of the project before completing the rehab portions was as per principle.

Dealing with the application would only contribute to further delay and this would inconvenience the society members, the court said. “Sometimes, as these petitioners will realise, a thoughtless obsession with some nebulous principle can prove expensive. It is one thing if the proponent is to bear the cost of that quixotic pursuit. But it should never be allowed to come at the cost of the unwilling, the disadvantaged, or, worst of all, those who are not even told that they will literally have to ‘pay the price’ of the principle.”