Anil Singh, TNN, Nov 4, 2010
MUMBAI: "The curse of the poor has worked on chief minister Ashok Chavan," social activist Medha Patkar said on Wednesday, refering to the demolition of slum colonies by his government.
Recounting the blatant violations by the 'neta-babu' clique in the Adarsh housing scam, Patkar said that these very people were ruthless when it came to slumdwellers. "The women of Mandala slums in Trombay had sent a housing proposal to the CM but he had no time to look at it," she said at a rally organised by the National Alliance for People's Movements (NAPM) at Azad Maidan on Wednesday.
"We were looked upon with contempt whenever we went to Mantralaya for housing rights for slumdwellers. Chavan would not spare even two minutes for us," Patkar said.
She said that the Urban Land Ceiling Act had been repealed depite the fact that a handful of people own 30,000 acres in Mumbai. "Can't the government acquire a fraction of this land to house the poor?," she asked.
"When slum dwellers living by the sea are evicted because they are in the coastal regulation zone, how come Adarsh housing society was permitted in the same zone?," Medha said, adding that the law was used only to deprive the poor of their basic right to housing.
She wondered how the army was to defend the country when it could not protect its own land. "Let the army also probe how a private builder gobbled up their land in Golibar in Santa Cruz (E) ?," she said.
"If roadside hawkers are called encroachers, what do you call officials who reduced a 60-metre road to 18 metres to facilitate Adarsh housing society?," she said.
Later in the evening Patkar and a delegation of NAPM activists met the governor and demanded that big land deals in the last five years be re-examined.
The NAPM has also written to union ministers Pranab Mukherjee and A K Antony, who are inquiring into the Adarsh scam, reminding them how the Maharashtra government suppressed the truth right from 2008, when the NAPM had complained about irregularities in the Adarsh housing society. The NAPM got details about the society using the Right to Information (RTI) Act.
The NAPM letter says that the Adarsh housing society scam shows how the politician-builder lobby is grabbing land in Mumbai, Pune and other urban centres. All the same, the poor who are forced to live in slums, are told that their houses are illegal.
"The builders have assumed disproportionate control over the state machinery," says the NAPM letter, urging the union ministers to go to the root of the Adarsh housing scam.
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