The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has withdrawn its stop-work notice issued to the Saifee Burhani Upliftment Trust (SBUT) on its Bhendi Bazaar cluster redevelopment project.
The BMC had, in December 2019, issued a stop-work notice to the SBUT for initiating construction work on one of its proposed seven clusters, without the mandatory commencement certificate from the building proposal (BP) department. The project involves the cluster redevelopment of 280 buildings spread across 16.5 acres and divided into 9 sub-clusters in Bhendi Bazaar in South Mumbai.
The project, the city’s largest cluster redevelopment project, was announced in 2008 by the then Syedna of the Bohra community.
SBUT office-bearers had held meetings with chief minister Uddhav Thackeray after he took over in November 2019. A senior civic official said that the SBUT had gone back to the drawing board and picked its earlier layout plan instead of the revised layout plan. “The 2019 layout was not approved, so SBUT has gone back to the old layout which has been approved by the HPC and BMC,” said a senior civic official.
“The stop-work notice was issued to a part of the SBUT project following a letter from the BP department. It has been withdrawn,” said Chakrapani Alle, assistant municipal commissioner, C ward.
Officials said that currently, the first phase of the redevelopment project, Al Sa’adah Towers, has been completed and work on Sector 1 A is underway.
“Our master plan has been approved by the HPC and BMC. We have also just recently received Intimation Of Disapproval (IOD) for sub-cluster 6. As soon as we receive a Commencement Certificate (CC), we will begin construction. Buildings in sub-clusters 4, 7 and 9 are being vacated so that construction work can be carried out soon. Out of the total 3,200 residential tenants covered in the project, nearly all tenants have vacated their premises to facilitate construction work. A handful of tenants remain to be vacated Similarly, over 1,200 commercial tenants (out of the total 1,250) have moved out, either on rental or in commercial transits,” an SBUT spokesperson said.
“Based on the feedback from the many commercial tenants, a temporary on-site transit facility has also been built for commercial tenants right in the heart of the project in sub-cluster 2 to ensure minimum to zero displacement to businesses while the construction work is underway,” the trust spokesperson said.