Cessed buildings’ mapping under way

“A detailed development plan with better layouts will then be chalked out for renewal of each precinct. Anyone who wants to reconstruct the buildings will have to take up the clusters defined in our study and leave ample open spaces,wide roads and other amenities as mandated by us,” said Sulakshana Mahajan,urban planner with the MTSU.

The MTSU,an advisory body to the state government,has already mapped every single cessed building using the geographic information system (GIS) in each of the nine civic wards of the island city. This will be followed by a socio-economic study,which will involve talking to the tenants and various other stakeholders.

The Rent Control Act has frozen rents in all old tenanted properties to rentals charged in 1947. It has led to a deadlock as the paltry rents do not allow landlords to maintain the building. It was only in 1969 that the repair board of MHADA was constituted to collect a repair cess from tenants in exchange for maintaining the buildings.

Over the past few years,private developers have been roped in by granting additional FSI for redeveloping the cessed buildings. Housing experts have blamed the blanket incentive FSI policy for the gentrification it leads to,the burden on infrastructure it creates and the threat to the heritage fabric it poses. Many of the rundown cessed buildings still continue to be neglected while the onslaught of redevelopment has claimed many of the perfectly sound cessed structures.

“In course of our mapping exercise,we realised that some tenanted areas such as the Dadar Parsi Colony or the Marine Drive buildings can easily be declassified from their cessed status as they are in very good condition,” said Mahajan,adding that the study shows that wards B and C (Sandhurst Road-Marine Lines) have the most number of dilapidated cessed buildings in urgent need for repairs or reconstruction.

The mapping is important in the light of the Centre’s directive to the state to work on scrapping the Rent Control Act. As and when the Act is scrapped,it will make way for a new system where tenants and landlords become co-operative societies or condominiums of multiple owners.

This will allow them to take up self-redevelopment or appoint a developer through a proper bidding process as against the current system of developers buying out the landlord and forcing the tenants to eventually move out.