Maharashtra state will enable selling of SRA flats in just 5 years lock-in period.

The State housing department would shortly be enabling the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) project beneficiaries to sell their homes in five years instead of ten years. Housing Minister Jitendra Awhad made the announcement at the assembly on 25 February to reduce the lock-in period.

The decision was taken on the basis of a recommendation provided by a sub-committee of the cabinet that was created in 2017 to evaluate the regulation on the buying and selling of SRA tenements. The sub-committee was chaired by then minister of housing Prakash Mehta in 2017. The Sub-Committee now led by Awhad, submitted its report late last year.

Slum-dwellers get free-of-cost houses under the SRA system but they cannot sell or rent them out for 10 years. The state government is entitled to a sum equal to the stamp duty or Rs 1 lakh, whichever is greater if sold after the lock-in period. However, 13,000 SRA flat owners in Mumbai violated the lock-in period and resold their properties between 2011 and 2017 according to the housing department data. Those owners will have to pay the state government 10 per cent of the existing ready reckoner rate as a penalty regardless of the new decision to halve the lock-in time.

Awhad said in the assembly that the government of Maha Vikas Aghadi is planning to launch an amnesty policy in which the selling of these 13,000 houses will be regularized by paying 10 per cent of the existing ready reckoner cost as a penalty. He said the issue of expelling the new occupants of these flats is underway at the Bombay High Court, which had directed the state last year not to allow any unauthorized occupants or tenants in houses issued under a welfare scheme. Awhad said, “We have referred the issue to Advocate General Asutosh Kumbhakoni. We will also notify HC, about the cabinet sub-committees’ suggestions, and final orders will be released only after the court has given its consent.”

An HC bench of justices Satyaranjan Dharmadhikari and Riyaz Chagla said in December 2019 that “the rules remain despite a change in the political release.”

Justice Dharmadhikari said, “The so-called homeless, poor people should not have moved the permanent alternative accommodation, particularly after they presented themselves as slum-dwellers. They coerced third parties or transferred the premises in complete disregard of the terms and conditions which they had agreed.”