Mumbai: The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is yet to take possession of 166 land parcels over 7.59 lakh sq.ft. spread across Mumbai for which it has spent nearly ₹540 crore over the last two decades.
The money was paid upfront as part of acquiring cost for the land. The land parcels, located across the island city and suburban Mumbai, would have created a land bank that would have helped the BMC set up playgrounds, primary and secondary schools, markets, roads under the Development Plan, and recreational grounds.
Activist Anil Galgali, who acquired the information from the BMC through a Right to Information application, said, “The data provided to me under RTI reveals that the BMC should have had a huge land bank by now, as some of the proposals for acquiring land were submitted over 20 years ago.”
Mr. Galgali asked why none of the land had become available to the civic body despite 50% of the land cost being deposited upfront. He questioned locking up the taxpayers’ money in this manner.
A senior BMC official from the Development Plan department told The Hindu , “It is true that many of these 166 proposals have been pending for several years, even 20 years in one case. However, it is not fair to say that no land has become available to the civic body through the old and new Land Acquisition Act (LAA) legislations.”
The official said that Mr. Galgali’s RTI application focused its queries only on pending land acquisition proposals moved by the BMC, and not on the number of transactions successfully completed through the same Collector’s office. “Kindly provide us with some time and we will pull out the data of successful land acquisition transactions by the BMC under the LAA,” he said.
The official added that in Mumbai, whatever the classification of the land (Collector, private or public land), there is almost no vacant possession available. “This means that the land acquisition can only be completed after the encumbrances and encroachments are removed from the land parcel. In many instances, the property was encroached upon 20% of its land mass when the acquisition process commenced, but by the time the transaction was completed, it was found to be encroached upon 80 to 100%,” he said.
The BMC official also noted that clearances and other procedures take up time as the laid down procedure has to be followed.
“Most of the proposed land acquisitions were under the old LAA. Under the new Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Amendment) Bill, 2015, the BMC will have to pay 2.2 times the market value to the land owner. Things are only going to get more expensive,” the official said.
