High court chides SRA over unilateral notification of private land as slum

The Bombay High Court has ordered the SRA CEO to explain the classification of private land as slum due to adjoining slum status, after a landowner's plea.

MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court last week directed the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) to file an affidavit explaining how privately-owned land could be declared as a slum under the Slum Rehabilitation Act, merely on the ground that the adjoining land has been declared as a slum. It reprimanded the SRA after a subordinate officer submitted the affidavit in the CEO’s place.

Bombay High Court at Fort, in Mumbai (HT Archives) (Anshuman Poyrekar/HT PHOTO)

A division bench of justice G S Kulkarni and justice Manjusha Deshpande was hearing a plea by Ramesh Singh, a landowner in Malad, who claimed that he kept receiving notices from the SRA unilaterally declaring his land as a slum.

Singh’s plea contested a November 2024 notice issued under Section 13(2) of the Maharashtra Slum Areas Act. He argued that his 440 sqm plot in Malad (East), which has only 5-6 structures and is reserved in the city’s Development Plan 2034 for a garden and a DP road, was wrongly tagged with the adjoining slum land that houses 128 dwellers.

The court noted that the petitioner’s right to develop private land had earlier been upheld by the court in August 2024, and the SRA could not forcefully include his plot in the scheme. The court questioned the legality of classifying the land as “slum” merely because of a few structures.

The court had directed the status quo to be maintained, barring Singh’s land from being taken into any slum rehabilitation scheme until the final hearing. However, redevelopment of the adjoining land, which is notified as a slum, was allowed to proceed if done lawfully.

On September 2, the court pulled the SRA up by asking its CEO to explain how such decisions, affecting private property rights protected under Article 300A of the Constitution, were taken by subordinate officers. However, on September 9, when the CEO’s affidavit was supposed to be filed, the court was further antagonised when a subordinate officer of the SRA filed it instead of the CEO.

“At this stage, we are informed by learned Counsel for SRA that all these decisions are not taken by the Chief Executive Officer, and they are taken by the subordinate officers. We are quite surprised at this submission. This position must also be made clear in the affidavit of the SRA as to whether the officers subordinate to the Chief Executive Officer take such decisions and under what authority in law,” the court noted.