Wednesday, December 09, 2015

State finalising airport-specific slum rehabilitation scheme

The issues of expansion of and security around the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) was raised in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday, with the Central government blaming the developer for failure of the rehabilitation project. The government also pointed that the Airports Authority of India (AAI) has now accorded in-principle approval for rehabilitation project and the state government is in the process of finalising an airport-specific slum rehabilitation scheme.

The government's reply was in response to a question raised by Dr Kanwar Deep Singh of Trinamool Congress (TMC). Responding to the question regarding security and expansion of the airport, minister of civil aviation Ashok Gajapathi Raju said it was located in a thickly inhabited part of the city, and so there was no scope for expansion.

The major constraints regarding expansion and security were the unavailability of land and existence of slums on nearly 308.95 acres of airport land. As many as 75,000-80,000 hutments exist on the area with 3-4 lakh dwellers. Raju added, "Efforts have been made in the past for ex-situ rehabilitation of slum dwellers but they did not succeed due as the developer engaged for the purpose failed."

The Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL), which runs the Mumbai airport, had is 2013 cancelled its contract with realty major HDIL and sought compensation of about Rs276 crore, after it failed to complete the slum development project on time.
09/12/15 shahkar Abidi/dna
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