Botawala chawl to finally make way for highrises

“We recently issued orders for demolition of Botawala chawl buildings. We finished certifying chawl tenants. Over the past year,we moved the tenants to our transit camps since the buildings were in a very bad condition,” said M K Thombare,chief officer of MHADA’s repair and reconstruction board.

S S Ratansi,director of Sarah Housing Development Ltd,which is in charge of the Botawala chawl redevelopment,said while the approvals for cluster redevelopment were more or less in place,the project was awaiting other regulatory nods essential for any construction project.

“We are awaiting a clearance from the highrise committee,a no-objection from the fire department and an environment clearance. We expect to have them in place in six months. Once that is done,we will get the commencement certificate and start construction,” Ratansi said,adding actual construction will take three years.

The chawl,housing 423 tenements,was constructed by Botawala Trust in 1917 for workers of the nearby Mafatlal Mills. The six two-storey buildings made of wood and stone are spread over a 4,721.6-sq m plot. Some featured on MHADA’s annual pre-monsoon list of extremely dilapidated buildings several times in the past decade. Two of the six have already been demolished.

Though the state had accorded initial approval for cluster redevelopment of Botawala chawl in the beginning of 2012,the developer received a letter of intent only in January due to a litigation over the project in the Bombay High Court.

The developer,using a maximum floor space index of 4 permissible under cluster redevelopment rules,will construct five 20-storey buildings. Of the 22,000-sq m built-up area,around 14,200 sq m will be used for rehabilitating tenants. The rest will form the saleable component.

manasi.phadke@expressindia.com