Consultant hands Rs 5 cr bill for stalled Dharavi plan

The Dharavi Redevelopment project may be heading nowhere but the project management consultant Mukesh Mehta, has handed over a Rs 5.05 crore bill to the Dharavi Redevelopment Authority (DRA).

The Dharavi Redevelopment project may be heading nowhere but the project management consultant Mukesh Mehta, has handed over a Rs 5.05 crore bill to the Dharavi Redevelopment Authority (DRA).

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Mehta said his company, M. M. Consultancy Private Limited, had worked on the project for 20 months [March 2008 to November 2009] and deserved compensation.

The bill mainly includes salaries of Rs 2.97 crore for Mehta’s 45-member team.

The project advisor said his company should be compensated for repetitive, extra work.

This includes Rs 1 crore for Mehta, the firm’s chief executive officer, and Rs 25 lakh for his son, Shaan, the chief operating officer. The company has already been paid Rs 11 crore in the last five years as pre-tender activity. The DRA, the body implementing the project, has objected to Mehta’s demand saying that it goes against the original agreement. The agreement states that any additional work during the project would be treated as incidental and would not entail any extra remuneration.

DRA officials refused to comment saying they are not authorised to speak to the media. Mehta refused to comment. “I do not wish to court any controversy. You can write what you want,” he said.

Former chief secretary D M Sukhthankar, who was heading the 11-member expert committee studying the project, flayed the demand. “The claim has no basis. It is a part of his [Mehta’s] work,” said Sukhthankar.

He added that the committee did not find merit in the Rs 11 crore made to Mehta. “We were not satisfied with the magnitude of the work carried out.”

The state has appointed a three-member conciliatory committee of three senior bureaucrats. The Rs 15,000-crore Dharavi Redevelopment Project planned to revamp 535 acres of India’s largest slum into a plush township. The project ran into several obstacles like a survey by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, which declared a majority of the residents ineligible for houses the project. Several developers also pulled out of the project citing lack of transparency.