MHADA LOTTERY: 1,194 LOWCOST HOUSES ON SALE

MUMBAI:THE Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (Mhada) has announced lottery of 1,194 lowcost houses, priced between ₹16 lakh to ₹58 lakh, in Mumbai by this year-end.

According to Mhada president Uday Samant, this lottery is part of the annual lottery introduced by the housing body for homebuyers.

“We have houses spread across the city and we expect a good response,” said Samant.

These houses are located in places like Antop Hill, Pratiksha Nagar in Sion, Mankhurd, Tagore Nagar at Vikhroli, Pant Nagar at Ghatkopar, Sahakar Nagar at Chembur, Siddharth Nagar at Goregaon and Parel.

Mhada houses have retained their popularity in the last ten years, with 14.13 lakh applications submitted for the 23,742 houses that were put up for sale.

However, private builders inflating real estate prices to exorbitant levels also caused home buyers to postpone their purchase plans. Mhada house prices also went up. MUMBAI: The city’s elected corporators are more concerned about naming and renaming roads, buildings, junctions, and monuments, instead of pressing civic issues such as traffic jams, condition of gardens and open spaces, health care, education, power and water supply, solid waste management and sanitation that affect Mumbaiites’ daily lives, according to Praja Foundation’s report card for 2018.

According to Praja, corporators raised 320 issues related to naming and renaming of roads in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s general body and committee meetings, which is second only to the condition of roads (366 times), between March 2017 and March 2018.

Issues related to corruption, scams and accountability were raised only 18 times. Effectively, the relevance of questions asked by corporators to citizens’ complaints scored only 26.2%.

Heath and health infrastructure issues were raised 221 times, those related to education 154 times, solid waste management 159 times, water supply 84 times, and toilets 68 times.

Milind Mhaske from Praja Foundation said, “The report card presents a picture that corporators are not aware of exactly what the citizens want.”

This is the first year Praja Foundation graded representatives elected in civic polls of February 2017. As it is the first report card of the incumbent civic government, Praja has used its findings to gauge the performance of this civic government in comparison to the old government between 2013 and 2016.

The quality of questions asked dropped to 42.2%, from the average score of 49.7% of the previous government. Despite this, present corporators fared better than the previous government in accessibility and awareness about issues. They scored 55.5%, in comparison to the previous government’s 45.3%.

The overall grade of present corporators increased marginally to 59.6%, from the previous years’ 59.5%.