The Brave Pedestrian

Mumbai, 25 th May, 2016: While we are sitting in the comfort of our homes, an unfolding tragedy is transforming proud flat-owners into paupers and destitutes who will die in tiny rented homes, senior citizens homes or in the houses of their children, and the memories of the flats that they once owned will be cremated with them. In the name of redevelopment, millions of flat owners are being led like sheep to the slaughter – not only humble salaried workers, unthinking housewives, aged pensioners, over-dependent widows, but also doctors, lawyers, CAs, MBAs, MNC executives, bureaucrats, businessmen, tech-savvy housewives and career-women. Cooperative housing societies are full of financial illiteracy, ignorance of ground realities, overconfidence and gullibility. The redevelopment mantra of cooperative housing societies is: "jo sabka hoga, woh hamara hoga, bharosa rakho" i.e. "What happens to others will happen to us, so have faith." A few thousand buil...

Dirty Tricks of Developers, Managing Committees and Project Management Consultants Mumbai, 8 September 2015: Some residents of a cooperative housing society in Mulund have painstakingly documented step-by-step how builders, project management consultants and society office bearers work together to hijack the flats of even intelligent and educated flat-owners, and hand them over to third parties. In a letter sent to Municipal Commissioner Ajoy Mehta last week, seven residents of Shree Gurukrupa Nagar Co-operative Housing Society Limited on Nahur village road have alleged that their society's Secretary and other managing committee members have abused their power and influence to confer the society’s development rights on a business entity called “Concrete Siresukan Realty LLP” which did not even bid in the society’s tender. “Neither this LLP nor its designated partners, Mr Anuj Desai and Mr Nilesh Dalal, participated in the tender/bidding for the society’s redevelopment project. ...

Cooperative housing societies are really “Uncooperative” housing societies. Argumentative flat-owners, habitually opposing one another, usually accept whatever clauses the developer and his lawyers include – and therein lies the tragedy. The builder usually gives Financial Bank Guarantees, which are more generalized and less safe than Performance Guarantees, and succeeds in safeguarding his own commercial interests, while making a fool of the society and its members. Housing societies, their office-bearers and their members generally have no idea of the financial risks that are being loaded on them. Chronically unwilling to spend money on and accept advice from serious legal professionals (as against aloo-chaaloo advocates), they accept unnecessary risks with a fatalistic statement: jo sabka hoga, woh hamara hoga. (Only those who have been living away from their houses for many years – usually without rent-allowance from builders – have any idea of the seriousness of these dealings...

7th December 2013, Mumbai: Nowadays, Mumbai looks like one massive construction site. With thousands of buildings at various stages of redevelopment, the gigantic bulldozer of commercial redevelopment is leaving a trail of financial casualties and collateral damage to thousands of citizens. The common man, government and judiciary are all turning a deaf ear to the suffering of thousands of families affected by redevelopment, because they are all in favour of “the majority”. With clever financial engineering, nice brochures and websites, and a pre-planned package of half-truths, builder firms convince thousands of financial illiterates about the attractiveness of their proposals.  Flat owners and office bearers generally don’t know how to read a balance sheet, have no understanding of law, and cannot understand the various risks that they will be made to carry for several years. The beautiful dream of being rewarded with a new and larger house and lakhs of rupees as corpus fund mak...