Govt to protect slums that sprung after '00

MUMBAI: With elections to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) just six months away, political populism is back on top of the Congress-NCP agenda. The Democratic Front government in the state is planning a legislation to regularise slums in Mumbai that have come up till the year ’00, chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told a Congress delegation led by Mumbai Congress president Gurudas Kamath on Thursday. At present, the cut-off year is 1995.

Last month, ET had quoted minister of state for urban development Rajesh Tope saying that the DF government was planning to protect all pre-’00 slums in Mumbai by either moving an amendment to the 1995 Act or introducing a separate legislation itself.

Apparently, the Congress-NCP alliance wants to fulfil its election promise of ’04 that it would regularise pre-’00 shanties, ahead of the ’07 BMC polls. The promise had worked in ’04 assembly polls, fetching the alliance 21 of the 34 seats in Mumbai.

But despite the election promise, the Deshmukh government carried out a massive demolition drive against post-1995 slums in the city from December ’04 to February ’05, razing more than 80,000 hutments and displacing more than four lakh people. The state cleared as many as 300 acres of land of illegal slums.

But a pro-active Mr Deshmukh surrendered to his party president Sonia Gandhi’s diktat to protect slums and stopped the demolition drive. The state also told the Bombay High Court, which was hearing a related case, that the promise to protect pre-’00 slums was a “printing mistake” in the manifesto.

Later, the state government pleaded before the high court that slums that have come up till ’00 also needed to be given protection on humanitarian grounds. The court asked the state to file a detailed explanation justifying the need for a new legislation which the state plans to bring in now.

Mr Deshmukh has also assured that till the proposed legislation gets enacted, slums in Mumbai that get displaced due to infrastructure projects would be rehabilitated.