Slum redevelopment on slow track

8220;Land is not a problem. Resettlement depends on the WB loan,8221; says Principal Secretary Urban Development, K Nalinakshan.

Last year, a joint railway-state government sub-committee identified 12 plots of land all along the railway tracks at Matunga, Ghatkopar, Bhandup and Sion for resettling all the project-affected persons. The recommendations have yet to be implemented in the absence of funds.

8220;Steps like dereservation of the land will start only after the project itself starts,8221; says Sheela Patel, director of the NGO, Society for Promotion of Area Resources SPARC. She statedthat the homework for the project had already been done.

Resettlement is being seen as the only alternative to clearing scarce railway land for expansion projects. However, as with the major multi-crore resettlement proposals in the city, some suggested nearly a decade ago, slum resettlement on the railways still remains firmly paper-bound.

There have been only four small but successful rehabilitation projects, all of them undertaken with private participation.

In 1996 the Metropolitan Transportation Project began work on the vital Rs 50-crore fifth and sixth corridor between Kurla and Thane. The MTP couldn8217;t spend more than Rs 3.5 crore because the eastern side of the tracks were completely encroached by slums.

Work on the section began in full swing after 900 families were shifted out into a 20,000-square metre plot owned by the state government at Kanjurmarg. The houses were constructed last October by SPARC.

Earlier in 1989, over 1000 families of the Bharatnagar and Mahatma Phule Nagar atMankhurd were rehabilitated for building the Mankhurd-Vashi rail link. In 1992, 300 families at Ravli junction were resettled for the realignment of the Kings Circle-Wadala railway line. In 1994 more than 160 families were resettled after work on the Borivli-Dahisar link.

This Wednesday, SPARC filed an intervention petition in the Bombay High Court in the ongoing case for evicting slum dwellers in the 10-metre safety zone. Stating that rehabilitation could be a solution to controlling encroachments, the NGO suggested ways in which rehabilitation could be achieved. The case is to come up for hearing next Tuesday.

But resettlement doesn8217;t come without its share of hiccups. A tempting central railway offer to resettle all the 30,000 encroachers on its sprawling estate at Thakurli was turned down after slum dwellers cited the distance factor.

8220;We are ready to shift if the government gives us alternate accommodation, but it should be near our place of work,8221; says Zubaida Shaikh, a resident of a hutmentcolony in Kurla.

As per the World Bank guidelines, the state government set up the Urban Rehabilitation Corporation URCOM to take up the project of resettlement. This was later changed to the Mumbai Urban Rehabilitation Project MURP on tentatively the same lines of the Shiv Shahi Punarvasan Prakalp SSPP.

It will offer a permanent solution, but resettlement will take time. 8220;MUTP is a five-year project, resettlement should take around three years in it,8221; Nalinakshan says. With the WB loan nowhere in the picture yet, that deadline seems even further away.