A RAY of Hope: India’s largest township for workers being readied at Solapur

The infrastructural logistics of this massive proletariat settlement posed a problem or two to the Ray Nagar Federation. A year ago, the body realised that the Solapur municipal corporation would be unable to supply water to the township for at least two years, struggling as it was to provide daily water to Solapur city its

Solapur: In Kumbhari, a village 12 kilometres away from Solapur, the finishing touches are being given to a mammoth building project of 30,000 homes. India’s largest settlement for workers from the unorganised sector, Phase 1 of the project, comprising 15,000 houses, is set to be inaugurated in the last week of December by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A RAY of Hope: India’s largest township for workers being readied at Solapur

The visionary behind this enterprise called the RAY Nagar Township is not from the BJP or its allied parties but a former CPM MLA, Narsayya Adam. Also piquant is the fact that RAY stands for Rajiv Awas Yojana, a vestige from the Congress era. As with many Congress projects, the Rajiv Awas Yojana was renamed by the BJP government to the Prime Minister Awas Yojana but the name of the township still bears the former acronym.

RAY Nagar is being constructed by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), with multiple amenities like schools, a healthcare centre, a sports ground, a water distribution system and solid waste management facilities. Members of the unorganised labour force such as power loom and beedi workers will get one-BHK homes of 300 square feet costing ₹5,05,000. Half this amount will come from central and state government subsidies.

The infrastructural logistics of this massive proletariat settlement posed a problem or two to the Ray Nagar Federation. A year ago, the body realised that the Solapur municipal corporation would be unable to supply water to the township for at least two years, struggling as it was to provide daily water to Solapur city itself. At this point, Narsayya Adam discovered that the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), which runs a power project at Hotgi village, had water to spare, as it was getting 144 MLD from the Ujjani dam against its daily need of 100 MLD. He also found out that NTPC had provided its excess water from one of its power plants in Uttar Pradesh to a nearby locality.

Since the distance between the NTPC power plant at Hotgi and RAY Nagar is also a minimal 18 km, the Federation approached the NTPC administration with a request for its excess water. However, the public sector corporation turned down the request. It was at this point that Adam personally approached PM Modi to get the work done.

“I met him around eight months ago, when NTPC expressed reservations about supplying the 24 Million Litres per Day (MLD) required for the township,” said Adam. “We pointed out that NTPC had supplied water in one such case in UP. Modi promised us that he would take a decision on the issue within a week—and in four days, we got an approval letter from the central government. Despite the difference in our political ideologies, the PM helped from the very beginning.”

Adam is not new to township-building, having set up the Godutai Parulekar township near Solapur, a project of 10,000 homes for beedi workers, in 2006. However, when in 2011 he set up the RAY Nagar Federation to build the present township for workers, it took eight years to lay the foundation stone. The reason, he said, was politics.

“When we began our endeavour to set up another township for workers, I faced political opposition from the then union minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and his daughter, MLA Pranati Shinde,” explained the CPM veteran who had lost to Pranati in the 2009 assembly election. “The Congress was in power in the state and Centre so both governments created hurdles in my path.”

When Devendra Fadnavis became chief minister in 2014, Adam approached him next. “He not only aided me in the project but also helped me get assistance from the central government,” he said. “As a result, in 2019, eight years after we formed the Federation, the foundation stone was laid by PM Modi.” Interestingly, Adam was handed a three-month suspension by the CPM for “hurting the party’s image” with his act of praising Modi and Fadnavis at the public function held on the occasion.

Adam said that as he had already founded a township of 10,000 homes, workers had faith in him. “When we set up the RAY Nagar Federation, within a year 30,000 workers joined us and deposited ₹6,000 each to buy the land at Kumbhari,” he said, explaining the costing. “Now each one will have to pay ₹50,000 as an upfront contribution and take a bank loan of ₹2,00,000 from a nationalised bank. The remaining money will come in the form of a ₹1.50-lakh subsidy from the central government and ₹1-lakh subsidy from the state government. We have tied up with around eight nationalised banks, and so far 12,000 loan proposals have been approved.”

As of now, Kumbhari has a gram panchayat. However, since a township of 30,000 flats will be difficult to manage, MHADA vice-president Sanjeev Jaiswal directed the local administration to prepare a proposal to give Kumbhari the status of a city council. But, as the state government has now pointed out, this will be possible only after the next census. Meanwhile, the second phase of 15,000 flats is expected to be ready by December 2024.