In Wings: Clearing Mumbai airport slums

Mumbai: The GVK-South Africa consortium has quietly begun work on a solution to rid the Mumbai airport of the predictable first roadblock towards modernisation: the 85,000-odd hutments that welcome every jet touching down at the airport.
The joint venture company entrusted to put India’s busiest airport at par with the best in the world has taken nascent steps to demolish these slum colonies by beginning dialogue with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) and non-governmental organisation Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC).
At a cost of at least Rs 2,000 crore, MMRDA is planning to clear the land of the illegal shanties—identified in 30-odd pockets around the airport—by December 2008. As per plans, majority of the Project Affected Persons will be resettled at a 55-acre AAI plot in Dahisar.
Top MMRDA sources said that the agency—it will outsource the resettlement and rehabilitation to agencies like SPARC ‘‘on lines of the MUTP,’’ according to Chandra-shekhar—is set to sign a Memorandum of Under-standing (MoU) with the developers after Monday.
16/04/06 Lekha Agarwal/Mumbai Newsline

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