Summary
One of Mumbai's urban legends has it that the city's land cartel meets every month to decide the direction of the city's property rates. The meeting is unobserved and unrecorded, but were anyone to break inside, the entire insidious nexus between property developers, politicians, bureaucrats and the police would stand revealed to the citizens, who are always caught in the struggle of either buying a roof over their heads or upgrading the ones they already own. The city with the most precious real estate in the country is fast deteriorating at the hands of archaic urban laws and the merciless politics of land."The builder-politician nexus has made property unaffordable," says Chandrashekhar Prabhu, housing expert and architect. Mumbai's land is ironically both artificially over-valued due to the land cartel and also undervalued. A large population of South Mumbai resides in rent-controlled apartments protected by an outdated law, paying for example, as little as Rs 150 for a 3,000 sq ft apartment on Marine Drive. Even as an estimated 500 people arrive in the city every day, this imbalance has intensified the lack of affordable housing.
As Mumbai has stretched its boundaries from Virar in the west to Navi Mumbai in the east, the acquisition and use of land has remained unchecked. "The land mafia has usurped land in the Vasai- Virar belt from the local adivasis, and it has gone unnoticed in the flurry of development activities in central and suburban Mumbai," says a bureaucrat. Even when cash-strapped working Mumbaikars do manage to buy a flat, many unscrupulous builders do not give them an occupation certificate which entitles them to amenities like water and roads. An example of illegal occupancy is the Ulhasnagar suburb, where the court ordered the demolition of over 500 buildings after years of illegal construction. The residents got a stay order after one building was demolished.See the full content of this document
Extract
The Politics of Land and Nreal Estate
The city's housing problem is not due to a shortage of land but due to its restrained supply by the Government and private owners. Of the 15,000 acres of land under private ownership, the Government can legally use 25 per cent under the Urban Land Ceiling Act to build houses for the poor. "But it's being hoarded to create artificial scarcity of la...
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