Thane, Apr 29: The Thane District Congress Committee has urged Union Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation Minister Ajay Maken to sanction on priority 15,000 dwelling units under the “Rajiv Awas Yojana” for the city to meet its growing shelter demands.
City Unit Chief Balkrishna Purnekar and party MP Hussan Dalvai called on the minister during the weekend and submitted him a memorandum detailing the issues.
He appealed for effective implementation of the Awas scheme and listed as many as 15 demands which included making available transit camps for those who would be rendered homeless after the razing of illegal structures.
The memorandum said that there is a great scarcity of land in Mumbai and MMR.
“The demand of affordable housing is very high compared to availability of such stock. GOM is trying its best but could't succeed. This has given rise to unauthorised and unplanned development. Land mafia and builders in collusion with local officers of corporation and revenue authority, are grabbing the land and developing the same in unauthorised manner.”
“In recent past, incident of building collapse in Mumbra is an eye-opener example of such illegal/unauthorised development. This has cost 74 lives and many more injured. This can only be prevented if systematic efforts are made for creating sufficient number of affordable houses,” it said.
As much as 70% of population of Thane city is living in unauthorised buildings. These buildings are of poor quality and bound to become dangerous over the period of time. At present there are about 1100 such buildings in Thane city, the letter added.
Hence they urged Maken to make certain provisions in RAY in context of Thane which would facilitate implementation of the scheme to a greater extent.
The leaders demanded that Land pooling and acquisition policy should be brought in which urban local bodies (ULB) can abide equivalent area cost and deposit that cost in Maharashtra jurisdiction.
A beneficiary selection and monitoring committee comprising of nine persons should be for selection of beneficiaries of the scheme, the memorandum urged and added that the committee will also monitor and prevent new slums. The costs to run this committee should be 100% reimbursed to ULB till RAY.
They also wanted that all the social schemes run by central, state and urban local bodies should be merged for RAY beneficiary cost and also wanted new directives to promote satellite township at ULB level and cost be born by the Central government.
The memorandum further wanted a clear cut guidelines from the central government on the slum prevention policy and also wanted all dilapilated and unauthorized buildings land to be handed over to ULB for further merging procedure. It also suggested a 15% incentive on basic pay to the staff of ULB working in the RAY mission mode.
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