MHADA lottery for 238 houses, 108 shops

In what is clearly a pre-poll incentive, the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) chairman and Shiv Sena legislator Uday Samant announced on Wednesday that the housing lottery for 238 houses and 108 commercial shops in Mumbai would be called before elections in 2019.

The authority's Pune, Nashik and Aurangabad housing boards too will provide thousands of housing opportunities for citizens, said Samant. It was just recently, in December, that MHADA's Mumbai Board had called a lottery for 1,384 houses.

According to MHADA, they have obtained 238 houses from builders who undertook MHADA building redevelopment projects under the Development Control Regulation (DCR) 33(5). Under this scheme, developers are expected to give back some houses to MHADA. It is only since 2017 that the government has decided to accept cash premiums for redevelopment projects on MHADA layouts, instead of houses.

Of the 238 houses, 170 are in Sahakar Nagar, Chembur, 17 in the Juhu-Vile Parle Development Scheme and Azad Nagar, Andheri, 4 at Prabhadevi, Adarsh Nagar, Lokmanya Nagar, and Shivaji Nagar in Worli.

The authority has also decided to auction 108 commercial shops. The Free Press Journal had reported, after a decade-long delay, that MHADA is ready with the online auction process.

A bank has already been selected to carry out this auction. The prices of these commercial shops will range between Rs 21 lakh and Rs 1 crore. Meanwhile, MHADA has also decided to begin work on the Goregaon Pahadi housing township project by the end of May.

Madhu Chavan, chairman of Mumbai board of MHADA said, "The Pahadi Goregaon land has some reservations and a proposal has already been sent to the state to delete those reservations. Until then, we have decided to construct just 4,000 houses, as opposed to the earlier plan to build 7,000."