Mamata sop for slum families spells gold for real estate

Date : Nov 10, 2014

The Mamata Banerjee government has decided to grant building rights to around 2.5 lakh families occupying slums in some of Calcutta’s prime locations, leaving the field open for a free-for-all grab at potential real estate gold.

An occupancy certificate for a piece of thika land is ownership by another name, barring the right to register and mutate property.

Families living in the 4,500-odd slums across the city can build “permanent houses” on the plots they occupy or issue a power of attorney to a realtor. “Since many slums are in prime locations, there wouldn’t be a dearth of buyers for sure,” a senior official of the land and land reforms department said.

Around 10,500 bighas of thika and khatal land within municipal limits — wards 1 to 100 of the CMC — are registered as slums in the civic body’s records. Anyone who occupies a shanty in a slum is currently deemed as a tenant of the state.

A.K. Singh, the officer on special duty and executive officer of the land and land reforms department, has asked the controller of thika tenancy “to liquidate all letters of CMC regarding information of thika tenancy by November 2014”.

Singh issued the notification (LRC/170/214) on October 22.

According to the directive, the CMC is required to sanction construction plans on the basis of just the occupancy certificates issued to occupiers of thika and khatal land. Around 28,000 applications for construction of buildings on thika and khatal land have been pending with the CMC for more than 10 years, sources said.

In a normal scenario, anyone submitting a construction plan for municipal approval would need to produce a registered patta establishing title rights and proving that the land is free of encumbrances.

Since almost all thika and khatal land are in prime locations of Calcutta — Bhowanipore, Ballygunge, Dhakuria, Lake Gardens, Chetla, Hatibagan, Shyambazar and Belgachhia — CMC officials predict a construction boom. The average price of land in these areas varies between Rs 50 and Rs 60 lakh a cottah.

“The government is keen to implement the new policy before the civic polls sometime in May 2015,” a source said. “And why wouldn’t it be? Of the nearly 35 lakh voters in wards 1 to 100, more than 12 lakh are slum dwellers.”

Thika and khatal land is a legacy of the zamindars and affluent elite who would bring projas (working class people) from the villages to do various jobs for them. These migrants — from barbers to palanquin bearers — would be given plots of land against payment of khajna (rent). The thika, or contract, was that they could only build makeshift houses with tiled or thatched roofs.

The first change came in 1982 when the erstwhile Left Front government introduced the Calcutta Thika Tenancy (Acquisition and Regulation) Act to convert the projas into tenants of the state. The stipulation that all dwellings should be “single-storey kuchcha structures” was retained.

In 1993-94, all cowsheds on khatal land were evicted from the city and most of these plots have since been used as unauthorised garages and junkyards.

Sources said the Trinamul government’s decision would not only change the definition of thika and khatal land but also trigger a rush to extract the highest possible value out of these potentially prime plots. “Once someone gets the certificate of occupancy, he or she can issue a power of attorney to any other person for construction of buildings,” a CMC official confirmed.

Occupancy certificates are seen as a workaround in the absence of any scope to legalise ownership of slum land by issuing pattas.

“Since scores of cases filed by those from whom the government had wrested thika land are pending in various courts, it wasn’t possible to issue title rights or pattas to any occupant. A meeting at Nabanna last week decided that the controller of thika tenancy would instead issue certificates of occupancy that recognise possession of slum land and the CMC’s building department would sanction construction proposals on the basis of these documents,” a source said.

The occupants’ names won’t be mentioned as owners in the CMC’s assessment register and property tax bills, although they would be liable to pay civic taxes.

The government has already commissioned a survey of all slums and khatals. The survey, being conducted jointly by the CMC and the thika controller’s office, will be completed by the end of this month.

“It is a dangerous move aimed at allowing realtors to grab government land and bring monetary gain for the ruling party and those supporting it ahead of the civic elections,” said former mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya.

According to CMC estimates, each of the 4,500 slums in prime locations of Calcutta occupies between one and five bighas of land.

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