Dharavi revamp: Maharashtra govt relaxes eligibility criteria for developers

To be eligible for the project, developers need to have undertaken large real estate or township projects, including development of necessary amenities, physical and social infrastructure and incurred costs or received payments over the past seven years. Besides, they need to have successfully completed either slum redevelopment projects or rehabilitated families affected by construction of dams, power projects, airports, railways, industrial projects, roads and ports in the past seven years.

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While the government has retained these conditions, it has downsized the required size and cost of these projects by 50 percent, a move that will enable developers to show smaller projects as previous experience to fit the eligibility criteria, tender documents show.

Earlier, interested developers had to show experience in slum redevelopment or other rehabilitation projects by having executed at least one project of minimum 1,000 households, or two projects of 600 households or three of 500 households. This has now been relaxed to either one project of 500 households, two of 300 households each or three of 250 households each.

Similarly, the scale of the large real estate or township projects that the state will accept while evaluating a bidder’s eligibility has been reduced by 50 percent for all four sectors.

The state will also accept redevelopment works of cessed buildings in Mumbai or similar projects anywhere in the world to determine eligibility.

On April 30, officials from the Dharavi Redevelopment Project authority, the state’s nodal agency for the revamp, and the housing department met several developers, many of whom had evinced interest in the project, but never ended up bidding. Among other demands, they asked for the eligibility criteria to be softened by either considering experience only in large real estate projects or slum rehabilitation schemes instead of both, or else dropping both criteria by 50 percent.

A senior official from the state housing department said, “We carefully considered the request and did feel that the eligibility criteria is a bit too stiff. Also, ultimately, we want developers to take up the project. It is in everyone’s interest for the project to move forward. We hope for a better response now.”

Besides diluting the eligibility criteria, the government has also given in to developers’ demand of allowing the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) generated through the project to be used outside Dharavi, up to a maximum of 33 percent of the sale component. The schedule of payments of premium to the government and the minimum limits for stakes in a consortium have also been relaxed.