Pinnacle

Abhiram Ghadyalpatil, Mumbai
The Economic Times (Mumbai edition)

A bitter battle is about to break out in Mumbai. The fight is over land, one of the city’s costliest commodities. Many stakeholders are laying claim as the Maharashtra government gets ready to repeal the age-old, controversial Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act by July-end.

The primary stakeholder is the state government, which is sitting on a landmass of 30,023 acres (according to an affidavit filed by the government in August 2006 in the Bombay High Court). This, incidentally, is the land the Act defines as surplus.

The government, under pressure from the court and NGOs, is legally bound to acquire surplus land in two months’ time. “We have to acquire as much as we can till the act is in force, so that the acquired land can be used to house the urban poor,” an urban development secretary told ET.

But the class of 345 owners (individuals, institutions, companies, trusts and big industrial houses) holding surplus land in excess of 500 sq m each does not want to part with it since repeal of the law would release the land. They are trying every trick in the book to hold on to the goldmine.

“Even if the law is repealed, the government would remain the owner of the land it has acquired. Why would an individual or a company which owns, say 100 acres of prime land in Mumbai, want the government to acquire it? The land would virtually be a goldmine once the act goes,” said a builder, who is also an office-bearer of the Maharashtra Chamber of Housing Industry.

There is also a third stakeholder, a powerful one, at that: NGOs and activists who want the act to continue. The Brihanmumbai Nivara Parishad (Brihanmumbai Housing Council) of PB Samant, a Gandhian leader, is preparing for a long legal battle with the government.

“We have collected signatures of five lakh Mumbaikars who want the act to continue. Around 8,000 of these people are contributing Rs 10,000 each, and the corpus would be deposited with the chief minister as cost of the surplus land as per the current average stamp duty value. In return, the government must continue with the act, acquire the entire surplus land and use it to house millions of Mumbaikars who do not have houses of their own,” Samant said. He believes the government is dragging its feet on acquisition because it wants to hand over the land to the realty sector.

Samant claims that 30,023 acres of land, if acquired, could fetch the government around Rs 2 lakh crore if sold at the ready reckoner price fixed by the government itself. The council, he added, is persuading a large number of middle- and lower-middle class people to form cooperative societies and purchase land from the government to build houses at their cost. “This will also help the government raise money for Mumbai and solve the city’s housing problem,” Samant said.

So far, the government has been kind to the owners of surplus land. It was a PIL filed by Samant in 2006 that forced the government to admit it had acquired less than 1 percent (262 acres) of the eligible surplus land in Mumbai in 30 years under the law. In August 2006, it told the court it would acquire 1009.75 acres by February 2007. In February, the government informed the court that it had acquired 1,221 acres since August 2006.

That leaves a whopping 28,802 acres still to be acquired. “It’s a mammoth task to acquire this land in just two months. But we have designated 21 offices as competent authorities to acquire as much land as possible,” an official said.