Decide eligibility of slum dwellers along Tansa pipeline for rehab: HC to BMC

The Bombay High Court has directed the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to decide the eligibility of 19 hutment dwellers for rehabilitation within 16 weeks. This comes after the HC quashed eviction orders issued to 68 hutment dwellers in 2017. The current petitioners claim parity with the previous petitioners and argue that they are also eligible for rehabilitation. The BMC has been instructed not to take any coercive action against the structures of the petitioners until their eligibility is determined.

MUMBAI: Decide the eligibility of 19 hutment dwellers who had structures along the Tansa pipeline to be rehabilitated within 16 weeks, the Bombay high court directed Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday.

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The directive comes in the backdrop of an order of the HC in December 2022 wherein it had quashed the eviction order of the BMC issued to 68 hutment dwellers in 2017.

The structure owners had claimed that they were eligible for rehabilitation. However, the BMC had failed to decide their eligibility till December 2022.

The current structure owners have claimed parity with the previous petitioners and said that they were also eligible for rehabilitation in light of a government resolution of 2012.

The eviction notices were issued following an HC order wherein it had directed the BMC to remove structures within 10 meters of the pipeline which supplies water to Mumbai City and its suburbs.

The division bench of justice Sunil Shukre and justice Rajesh Patil while hearing the petition of the hutment dwellers in Bhandup was informed by advocates Imtiyaz Patel and Mohammad Shoeb that the petitioners had been residing in their hutments along the Tansa pipeline before 1995 and they had valid proofs to substantiate their claim.

The bench was informed that though the HC had passed an order in a public interest litigation in 2009 directing the BMC to ascertain the eligibility of the structure owners for rehabilitation, nothing had been done by the civic authority.

However, in 2017 the hutment dwellers received three eviction notices from the BMC asking the structure owners to vacate the premises.

Aggrieved by the non-compliance of the earlier order of the HC, the hutment dwellers had approached the HC in 2020 and 2021 through separate petitions.

In the first petition, the division bench of justice Nitin Jamdar, in his order of December 2022, had noted that as the BMC had failed to comply with the earlier order of the HC and subsequent orders directing the BMC to ascertain the eligibility of the structure owners in light of two government resolutions of 2012 and 2015, it was quashing the 2017 eviction notices of the BMC.

The HC had asked to decide on the eligibility of the said petitioners within 12 weeks.

In light of that the current petitioners informed the bench that they were similarly placed with the previous petitioners and hence directions should be issued to the BMC to ascertain their eligibility for rehabilitation as well.

After hearing the submissions, the bench noted that the BMC should check whether the petitioners were eligible for rehabilitation within 16 weeks and restrained the BMC from taking any coercive action against the structures of the petitioners till then.