The city’s most vexed land dispute has been solved. With the last bit of paperwork currently in progress, the long-running dispute between the state government and the Centre (represented by the Western Railway in this case) for a 45,000 sqm land along the fringes of Kherwadi in Bandra, has now been settled.
A few days after the WR applied for a property card of the land, city collector Sanjay Deshmukh told dna that the City Survey Officer had been asked to make an entry of the land in the name of WR.
This means that once the entry is made, the land officially becomes a property of WR, ending the fight that started way back in 2006.
The land, estimated to cost anything between Rs4,000 to Rs5,000 crore, is crucial for financing the Mumbai Urban Transport Project’s (MUTP) phase II work. In fact, the work’s progress will be jeopardised if the railway ministry can’t exploit the land commercially. The Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation, the executing authority for the railway-related works under MUTP, has written a string of letters to the state, which owes around Rs250 crore to the railways as payment for the work completed under phase II.
The plot has been at the centre of a tussle between the state and the WR regarding its ownership.
It started in September 2006 when the Rail Land Development Authority moved to auction the plot to garner revenue. The matter soon landed in court after the state claimed that the plot belonged to it. The matter played out in the Suburban Collector’s office as well as in that of the Divisional Commissioner of Konkan before the state revenue minister gave his order on December 4 last year adjudicating that the plot belonged to the railways.
