Mumbai: State to hold campaign encouraging societies to 'self-redevelop'

A self-redevelopment campaign conference of Mumbai’s cooperative housing societies is scheduled to be held on January 8, with the aim of providing vigour to self-redevelopment programmes.

The government in turn will take the responsibility of providing economic and technical assistance to make society committees redevelop the buildings themselves.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Cooperatives Minister Subhash Deshmukh are expected to attend the conference which is to be presided over by the chairman of Mumbai Cooperative Bank and MLA Praveen Darekar.

Cashing on self redevelopment, Mumbai Bank gave a presentation to MHADA in December, that it will give loans to societies to the tune of Rs 50 crore. There are nearly 30,000 societies across the city, including the cess buildings located in South Mumbai and need a No Objection Certificate from MHADA to go ahead with redevelopment. The bank says that it will directly pay the authority the money required for the permissions and will sanction the loan from the start of the project. This will eliminate the developer, to an extent and the dependency of the societies on them for redevelopment.

There are nearly 14,000 buildings in SoBo, which are not only dangerous to live in, but also needs urgent redevelopment as there's a lack of transit accommodation within city limits. Many developers have got into redevelopment of these buildings but then projects are stuck for various reasons, one of them primarily being that tenants of these building do not want to shift to far away transit camps, thus not vacating the buildings.

Darekar expects that the conference would help the housing societies understand how to go ahead with self redevelopment. The bank has already financed some societies and several examples of self redevelopment will be talked at the conference.