Corporator razes BMC approved fence, slaps bystander

MUMBAI, OCTOBER 19: If the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) gave you a chance to put a nice fence around your building, plant a sm...

MUMBAI, OCTOBER 19: If the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) gave you a chance to put a nice fence around your building, plant a small patch of green within it, lay a concrete footpath along the green, you would jump at it too, just like the residents of the Haffkine Employee’s Cooperative Housing Society, Chembur. The encroachers around their buildings had been removed by the BMC and they could go ahead with “beautification” work. Who would have thought that their own elected representative would come and disrupt the work? Worse still, slap someone in the process?

On October 10, corporator R T Kadam, did exactly that. Haffkine was in the process of completing the job when Kadam stormed the area and demanded the removal of the fencing, authorised by the ward officer, Dr S S Kudalkar, and carried out under police protection provided by Senior Inspector, Tilaknagar police station, R B Yennam. After heatedly espousing the cause of the slum dwellers and inciting them to break the fence, Kadam slapped Prakash Shinde, a man standing next to him, who was not even a resident of the building.

When residents marched in protest to Yennam’s office to lodge a complaint, the latter persuaded them to write a petition instead. Sympathising with Kadam because he was an “old man” and had been “annoyed,” the police asked the residents to tone down their complaint.

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The area around the buildings had been encroached upon a few years ago. “I asked them if they had any documents to prove that they had been living in that area before 1995 – ration card, number in the voting list – they could not come up with anything. The demolition was absolutely legal,” says Kudalkar.

Kadam claims that the hutments have been around for the last 25 years and can’t be “just thrown out.” He also claims that the fencing work itself was encroaching the main road of the area. “The Haffkine people never had any permission to fence the place. Yet they did it and blocked the road so that the slumdwellers could not even use the WC facilities,” says Kadam.

But why did he slap Prakash Shinde? Kadam claims that he never did any such thing and the residents are cooking up stories. So what if scores of people saw him doing it!

“Most definitely the fencing will be removed and the homes of people will be restored to them,” says a confident Kadam. True to his word, sections of the fence have been broken and few of the encroachers have returned today. Kudalkar has assured the residents that the encroachers will be removed as soon as he can organise police protection.

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