Officials are busy legalising slums

MUMBAI: The Maharashtra government, it seems, acts first and thinks about it later. After deciding to relax the cut-off date by five years to January ’00 for regularising illegal slums in Mumbai, the Vilasrao Deshmukh government has asked its babus to draft a policy to eforce its decision.

Coming in the wake of its amnesty to unauthorised buildings in Kalyan and Ulhasnagar, many consider the government’s charity show as vote bank politics. According to sources, the government is drafting a policy that favours regularisation of all slums that have come up till the year ’00.

“The chief minister has asked us to draft a policy on slums within a month. It should be ready by early November,” a senior government official said. This policy would be submitted to the Bombay High Court, which has specifically asked the government to go by its earlier order that protects slums that have come up till January 1, ’95.

The irony is that the state has already taken a decision to extend the cut-off date to January 1, ’00, and the policy that is being drafted could be a mere endorsement of the decision, officials said. The policy, officials said, would ‘convince’ the court why the state is bringing a legislation to extend the cut off year to ’00 on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.

Bureaucrats, who are under political pressure to ‘do the needful’, said the government seems to have evolved an unofficial mechanism to condone illegalities.

“The government first lets the people violate laws, like it allowed so many illegal structures to come up in Ulhasnagar. When the matter becomes sub-judice and the judiciary rightly upholds the law, the government changed the law ,” a senior bureaucrat said.

Last year, the government promulgated an ordinance regularising a large number of illegal structures in Ulhasnagar when the court had ordered immediate demolition of 855 unauthorised buildings. By issuing an ordinance which later became an act, the government succeeded in making the court order meaningless. Last month, a similar decision to regularise illegal structures in Kalyan-Dombivli was taken. Ironically, the government had justified the Ulhasnagar ordinance as an ‘exceptional case’.

Now, the government largesse has chosen a politically bankable constituency — the slum-dwellers. “Since the court will go by the existing law, the government is again toying with the idea of either changing the concerned act or bringing in a new legislation to suit its stand,” an official said.

The debate over the cut-off year assumes enormous significance in the context of an ambitious Mumbai makeover plan, officials feel. According to the present legal dispensation, pre-1995 slums cannot be relocated or demolished. Only those post-1995 and pre-’00 hutments are entitled for relocation and rehabilitation which are affected by Mumbai Urban Infrastructure Project (MUIP) and Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) being carried out by the MMRDA. “If cut-off year is ’00, under no infrastructure project will the state be legally permitted to relocate or demolish pre-’00 slums. This will not only affect the implementation of NURM projects, but also put huge financial burden on the state exchequer because more number of slums will become eligible for rehabilitation schemes,” an official said.