Show-cause notice to MHADA officials for allowing trespass

Sulaiman Hussain, Bilkhis Teli, Muhurat Tahirali, Shamshuddin Nizamuddin, Mohammad Haji Ahmed, Mohammad Razak, Arif Pehelwan, Ghulam Ibrahim, Saifuddin and Nafisa Sheikh were the ten tenants who vacated their tenements on June 16 to return back to their buildings. However, applications apparently written by them, typed out in English with mostly Urdu signatures and thumb impressions were taken to MHADA authorities on June 20 by someone else asking that they (the former residents) be allowed to stay in these tenements till monsoon is over in September. On humanitarian grounds, though without checking the veracity of their pleas, the application was accepted and sanction was granted for allowing them to stay on till September.

But the former residents were not the recepients of this grant by MHADA authorities. The rooms were opened for trespassers. Investigations by the chairman of the Repair Board showed a deep complicity of MHADA officials, whereby the applications had been found to have been typed in the MHADA office and by MHADA staffers themselves. Not only this, the MHADA clerk who received the applications obtained them all at one go, in a serial order. “When the authorities sanctioned the extended stay, was it not the role of the estate manager of the transit camps, Limaye, to put forward the surrender letters of the earlier residents? It is clear that such a thing cannot have taken place without the involvement of the estate manager,” said Chavan.

Accordingly, even the rent collector Zhodge has been sent a show cause notice and will be suspended pending investigations. The entire case has been sent to the CID for investigations, said Chavan.

MHADA has some of the worst problems of trespassers, who enter the tenements and then refuse to vacate under some pretext or the other. According to Chavan, 158 trespassers at Happy Home tenements in Borivli are refusing to vacate despite knocking at every court for a stay, without success. “I have now decided to hold the rent collectors mainly responsible for the trespassers,” Chavan told Express Newsline.