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Hans India
5 days ago
- Politics
- Hans India
CM Fadnavis inaugurates final phase of Nagpur-Mumbai 'Samruddhi Mahamarg', says path to prosperity delivered
Igatpuri (Maharashtra): Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who was accompanied by Deputy Chief Ministers Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar, on Thursday inaugurated the last phase of 76 km of Igatpuri to Aamne, Thane of the 701 km Hinduhrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg that connects Nagpur with Mumbai. With the inauguration of the last phase of Samruddhi Highway, the entire 701 km-long road has been put into service. Now, the Nagpur-Mumbai journey can be completed in eight hours instead of 16 hours. The distance from Igatpuri to Kasara will be covered in just 8 minutes and there are a total of 5 tunnels in this 76 km phase. Among them, the longest tunnel on the Samruddhi Highway is 8 km long is in Nashik district that starts from Igatpuri. Before the inauguration, the Chief Minister and both the Deputy Chief Ministers travelled through the tunnel by car. The CM said: 'Maharashtra's path to prosperity – paved and delivered!' He further said: 'A vision completed, boosting connectivity and driving sustainable growth for Maharashtra. Maharashtra's Prosperity Lifeline: Samruddhi Mahamarg!A historic moment highlighting Maharashtra's growth and progress through essential infrastructural development.' The Chief Minister's Office in a post on X said: "Dream Turns into Reality. CM Devendra Fadnavis enjoyed a drive on the 'Hinduhrudaysamrat Balasaheb Thackeray Maharashtra Samruddhi Mahamarg' along with DCM Eknath Shinde and DCM Ajit Pawar. This visionary project, and brainchild of CM Devendra Fadnavis himself, stands as a symbol of Maharashtra's progress. This historic drive witnessed the realisation of a long-cherished dream for the state.' Commenting on their travel together in the same car, Fadnavis said, 'Our car is working fine. We three work in three shifts.' CM Fadnavis said: 'We are happy that the inauguration of fourth phase and the entire stretch of 701 km of Samruddhi Mahamarg is now opened for vehicular traffic during the tenure of the MahaYuti government. Now in the next phase, the government proposes to develop Shaktipeeth Mahamarg which will completely transform the Marathwada and it will bring economic changes there. The work will begin soon on this project.' Of the 701 km, the first phase of 520 km of the Samruddhi Mahamarg was inaugurated by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi in December 11, 2023, the second phase of 80 km between Shirdi and Bharvir by ex-CM Eknath Shinde on May 26, 2023, the third phase of 25 km between Bharvir and Igatpuri by the former public works minister (MSRDC) on March 4, 2024. The MSRDC has constructed this 701-km long access controlled expressway at a cost of Rs 55,335 crore. The six-lane expressway, which passes through 10 districts, 26 talukas and 392 villages of the state, has been completed in phases. With the commissioning of entire project, 12 districts are now connected with Jawaharlal Nehru Port Authority. In a related development, the southern section of the Thane Creek Bridge-3 project of the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) that goes from Pune to Mumbai was also inaugurated by the Chief Minister through video conferencing. This section will make the Pune-Mumbai travel easier.
Time of India
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
‘Burn All…': Putin Orders Revenge Strikes; Russia Bombs Ukraine's Airbases, Weapons Plants
'Op Sindoor Was a Failure. If Balasaheb Was Alive...': Shiv Sena (UBT) Slams At BJP, Sena Replies Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut has hit back at BJP after the it mocked at Uddhav Thackeray's party over Balasaheb Thackeray's legacy. Calling the Operation Sindoor a failure, Raut said the senior Thackeray would have been disappointed at PM Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. He said both the top ministers fear to face questions from the Opposition but address rallies and beat drums about their achievements during the Operation Sindoor. Hitting back at Sena (UBT), Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Nirupam called Raut a 'foolish, mad and mentally unstable' person while slammed the party for stooping too low to earn political brownie points.#pmmodi #narendramodi #operationsindoor #amitshah #sanjayraut #shivsenaubt #shivsena #balasahebthackeray #sanjaynirupam #toibharat 6.1K views | 5 hours ago
Hindustan Times
27-05-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Dharavi dreams: Inside the plan to transform Asia's largest slum
'Dharavi is the Malabar Hill of Indian slums,' said Kiran Dighavkar. He was the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) assistant commissioner of G-north ward — under which Dharavi falls — during Covid, and widely lauded for his handling of the lockdown in the world's third largest and densest slum. 'If anyone living in a slum in India gets a marriage proposal from Dharavi, it's considered a leg-up for them.' Unlike the two other slums larger than it — Khayelitsha in Cape Town and Kibera in Nairobi, which lie on the outskirts of their cities — Dharavi's unique advantage is that it squats, 620 acres of swamp, sewer and slums, right in the heart of Mumbai. But now, it's that locus that is upending the lives of Dharavi's one million residents. A Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) comprising the government of Maharashtra's Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) and the Gautam Adani-owned Navbharat Mega Developers Private Limited (NMDPL) is in the midst of reimagining Dharavi which, in turn, involves widespread displacement including, for some, a possible relocation to a cleared landfill. 'Globally, this would be one-of-a-kind project,' said conservation architect and principal director of Urban Centre Trust in Mumbai, Pankaj Joshi. 'There have been other urban projects that have involved large-scale redevelopments like Wapping in London, the Hudson Yards in New York or the central waterfront at Rotterdam, but they were built on disused land. Here, we are talking about a piece of land that is densely packed with people and industry. Terms like urban renewal or regeneration don't apply to Dharavi because it's saturated with activity.' 'DRP is a transformative initiative aimed at overhauling one of Mumbai's most densely populated and economically significant areas,' said chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. 'Our aim with its redevelopment is to provide residents with improved housing, sanitation, and infrastructure. It's a chance to modernise industrial units to increase productivity and employment opportunities,' he added over email. 'Also equally, it's an opportunity to improve urban planning and integrate Dharavi into Mumbai's broader urban framework, addressing issues of congestion and accessibility.' The idea of redeveloping Dharavi and unlocking a precious land parcel in the heart of Mumbai has been a gleam in the eye of many a politician. Twenty-seven years ago, Mukesh Mehta, a suave architect, trained at the Pratt Institute, met Balasaheb Thackeray with a plan to redevelop Dharavi. 'Balasaheb had launched the Shivshahi Punarvasan Prakalp Yojana, a slum rehabilitation scheme to rid Mumbai of its Slumbai tag, and he was keen on Dharavi redevelopment.' Mehta created a concept that he called HI-HIKESS which involved developing facilities for Housing, Infra, Healthcare, Income-generation, Knowledge centres, Environment, Social integration and Security. 'Balasaheb loved the idea and asked me to discuss it with Uddhav who also approved of it. I got myself an office in Dharavi and thought I was on to a good thing.' Mehta had the idea alright but no money. Left at the mercy of successive governments, he got a rude lesson in the opacity of the bureaucracy. Finally in 2012, fourteen years after he had mooted the idea of Dharavi redevelopment to Balasaheb Thackeray, a committee of government secretaries scrapped the project and asked Mehta to leave. He is now in court against the Maharashtra government but refuses to go into the details of the litigation. Yet another claimant who subsequently stepped up to redevelop Dharavi, a UAE-based consortium, Seclink Technologies Corporation, too is in litigation with the state government challenging the overturning of its 2019 winning bid of ₹7,200 crore to redevelop Dharavi. The state government had annulled the tender and called for fresh bids in 2022 citing escalating costs and project modifications. 'To carry out redevelopment in Dharavi you need patience, very deep pockets and unstinting government support,' said Mehta, sipping beer in his sprawling art-lined apartment and reconciled with his once passion project now being executed by someone else. He would be 'happy' if Adani accomplishes the redevelopment, he said. 'It's an idea whose time is finally here.' Unease within In the cramped and buzzing innards of Dharavi, though, there is some unease. 'There is absolutely no transparency about the redevelopment plan. Ninety per cent of Dharavikars will be thrown out of the area. Even the ground-breaking ceremony in September last year was done in a secretive manner. If there is no ill-intent, why not put the plans in the public domain?' asked Baburao Mane, former lawmaker and resident of Dharavi who leads the Dharavi Bachao Andolan. The residents, said Mane, want in-situ rehabilitation and flats of 500 sq. ft. as opposed to the 225 sq. ft. most of them occupy at present. NMDPL officials who asked not to be named say the masterplan is with the government and it's for them to make it public.'The government is committed to ensuring housing for all. No one in Dharavi will be left behind,' said bureaucrat SVR Srinivas, the CEO of the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. For the residents, what's adding to their apprehension is the ongoing enumeration survey to decide who is eligible for in-situ rehabilitation. Those who can provide documents showing they have been living in Dharavi from before 2000 will be entitled to 350 sq. ft. homes within Dharavi, while those who came subsequent to that cut-off date have been termed as 'ineligibles' and will be rehoused in 300 sq. ft. quarters elsewhere in Mumbai. A 2006 UN-Habitat document defines a slum household as one that is lacking in any of the following: Durable housing, sufficient living area, access to potable water, sanitation and secure tenure. In India, however, there is no formal definition of what qualifies as slum. This ambiguity leaves Dharavi's agitators little option but to make full-throated noise about their demands and canvass political support. The Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the Congress and the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) along with smaller parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party support these residents. In a city, increasingly under the sway of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Dharavi stands out as the last bastion for these parties. Dharavi has voted a Congress MLA for five consecutive terms; the south-central Mumbai Lok Sabha constituency, of which Dharavi forms a significant chunk, has returned a Shiv Sena MP for three consecutive terms, while Dharavi's seven BMC wards have been dominated by corporators from the Congress and the Shiv Sena in the last three BMC elections. That makes at least some of the opposition to the project, political. 'Dharavi has been a consistently loyal voter base for certain political parties. To have a captive voter base disperse on account of redevelopment naturally raises their hackles,' said the urban planner, Pankaj Joshi. When he was still with the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) in 2018-19, Joshi's team of urban planners and researchers had produced a compendium of ideas to reimagine Dharavi. But there's more. Joshi put his finger on the central conundrum that dogs any efforts to redevelop Dharavi. 'From a slum pocket in the 1970s, Dharavi has emerged as a service provider not just for Mumbai but for the world. When you break up Dharavi, as is bound to happen in any redevelopment, you are breaking up a thriving ecosystem that offers great value.' Dharavi has 5,000 GST registered businesses, 15,000 household factories, and thousands more informal businesses, said BMC's Kiran Dighavkar. They range from industrial scale units recycling paper, plastics and textiles to robust pottery businesses. It also has units that make imitation jewellery, leather goods and wigs; it has coin smelters as also the city's largest farsan and idli making units. In its stiflingly-hot warrens, artisans from Uttar Pradesh produce exquisite embroidery for ateliers in Paris. The leather units provide base frames for handbags for international fashion houses, and elsewhere in the slum, sutures made from catgut are supplied to hospitals across India. In a 600 sq. ft. unit, like many of its kind across Dharavi, Mohsin Ahmed produces jeans which are sold to leading Indian denim brands. Selwan K, a member of the Dharavi Businessmen Welfare Association, estimates the annual turnover of Dharavi's multiple businesses to be in the vicinity of ₹10,000 crore. 'We've had multiple meetings with members of the NMPDL but they have not provided us with any clarity on the provisions for commercial properties in the masterplan,' he said. While NMPDL officials declined comment on the plan for resettling industries, Fadnavis told HT that there's no real reason for concern: 'All eligible commercial and industrial tenements will be accommodated in the Dharavi Notified Area (DNA) itself.' Space, he added, will be provided as per government resolution terms and conditions. The slum that houses Tamilians, Maharashtrians, Hindus, Muslims, Malabaris, Gujaratis and Christians has only one caste and one religion, said Kiran Dighavkar: 'Being Dharavikar. And they are motivated by only one thing, which is business.' Row upon row of slums grow vertiginous in the narrow lanes. They house the original inhabitants, their kith, kin imported from the village, the family's business unit and also the workers who toil there. Each of these tenements rising up to the skies in its inhabitants' search for upward mobility. So why dismantle Dharavi now? Six hundred and twenty acres in the heart of Mumbai is 'priceless,' said Dighavkar. Mumbai's ongoing and potentially transformative infra upgrade has made it even more precious. Serviced by two suburban rail networks, a spanking new metro line, the Sion-BKC Connector, the coastal road that has shortened the commute to south Mumbai, and the upcoming bullet train make Dharavi the city's most conveniently-located pin code. Separated from India's priciest commercial real estate, BKC, by a ribbon of sludge that is the Mithi river, Dharavi, when redeveloped, is expected to command prices upwards of ₹50,000 per estimate realtors. Multiple people that HT spoke to within DRP and the Adani-owned NMDPL said the project is expected to take 10 years to complete and the entire cost of the project is pegged at ₹2.5 lakh crore, including the price of land. 'The Maharashtra government is not putting in a paisa,' said a person close to the project. But the state government has handed over parcels of land across Mumbai to house the so-called ineligibles displaced by Dharavi redevelopment, and for free sale. In addition to 500 acres of usable land in Dharavi itself, NMDPL has been given 21 acres of land at a defunct state-owned diary at Kurla, 140 acres at Aksa and Malvani in north Mumbai, 40 acres of railway land at Mahim, 124 acres at Deonar — after the landfill has been cleared at BMC's expense — and 240 acres of land at Arthur, Jankin and Jamasp salt pans at Mulund and Bhandup. This largesse of 565 acres of land in addition to Dharavi's 500 acres given to NMDPL is backed by another clause. Any builder across the city looking to buy TDR (transferable development rights, or an instrument of transferring development rights from one area to another) will have to mandatorily buy 40% of their requirement from NMDPL, making the company one the most powerful builders in Mumbai. NMDPL officials counter criticism of any favouritism by pointing to the tender document for the Dharavi redevelopment project assuring concession in indexation. The Maharashtra urban development department has also said that the TDR mandate will be applicable only after the generation of TDR and as per the available quantity only. 'The Dharavi redevelopment is a vital public purpose project and some concession was necessary as earlier bids had no takers,' said SVR Srinivas. In February, he told the media, 'Unlike previous tenders, this time housing will be provided for all eligible residents, doubling the number of tenements. Naturally the cost will also increase, and TDR is part of this financing structuring to make this project viable.' As per the survey conducted so far, say NMDPL officials, nearly 50% of Dharavi's residents will be rehoused in-situ and given 350 sq. ft. flats. But Dharavi's famed potters' enclave, Kumbharawada, has already been marked ineligible. 'They had vacant land tenancy on BMC land but once the DPR was notified, they lost the right to be there. We will, however, re-house them elsewhere,' said an NMDPL official. 'Essentially, we are looking at future-proofing Dharavi; conceptualising a town that will become the heart of Mumbai. For the first time in Mumbai, or perhaps anywhere in India, slum dwellers will get houses, the titles of which will be in their own names.' Ineligible residents and industries and commercial units in Dharavi could be moved to either the Deonar landfill after it has been cleared or to the salt pans, or to an altogether new piece of land somewhere in MMR about which 'we don't know as yet,' the official added. Those who came to Dharavi between 2001 and 2011 will have to pay extra if they want more than 300 while those who settled in Dharavi after 2011 will have to bear the construction cost of their tenements as decided by the government. Commenting on the use of salt pan land, DRP CEO Srinivas said, 'The salt pan land was officially decommissioned by the Salt Commissioner of India some years ago. No salt manufacturing has been happening there for nearly a decade now. The seawater never even reached these areas after the construction of the eastern expressway. There is no issue with construction of affordable housing there and, unless we take such judicious steps today, the city could crumble under the population burden in the coming years.' For now, it's not just Dharavi's artisans and residents who await the unveiling of the masterplan, but also the rest of Mumbai. 'The chief concern is that it should not become yet another venue for one class of people to supplant another class,' cautioned Pankaj Joshi. After the mixed results of mill land redevelopment and the unthought out construction of BKC — with no open public spaces or amenities — Dharavi could be the last chance to reimagine an inclusive city, he said. NMDPL appears confident it can do that.
