Bhendi Bazaar revamp: Wakf board wants Bohra trust to stop work

MUMBAI: The Maharashtra State Wakf Board (MSWB), which has jurisdiction over all Muslim religious properties in the state, has said that it will ask the municipal commissioner to issue a stop-work notice to the Bhendi Bazaar redevelopment project by the Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust (SBUT). MSWB has alleged that the SBUT, a Dawoodi Bohra trust, started work on a plot of land that falls under the board’s jurisdiction even before the trust was granted a no-objection certificate (NOC). “We issued repeated notices to SBUT, but even after issuing four to five notices, we haven’t got any responses. So now we have decided to approach the municipal commissioner and ask him to issue a stop-work notice,” said Khalid Babu Qureshi, a member of MSWB.

Meanwhile, an SBUT spokesperson said that they did not receive any notice. “We may have only one or two Wakf properties that we are working on, and we have already applied for the NOCS. We knew that the Wakf would be reviewing around 2,600 NOCS, and assumed our application would be a part of this,” the spokesperson said.

The SBUT project plans to redevelop buildings housing 3,200 families and over 1,250 shops in the 16.5-acre area.

The board has also decided to take action against three more builders in Nashik, Haji Ali, and Mumbai Central respectively over allegedly constructing on Wakf land.

According to Wakf endowment rules, land and property donated to religious trusts cannot be used for a non-charitable purpose.