Brick by brick: Decoding the suicide of Suraj Parmar

The flutter created by the suicide of Thane developer Suraj Parmar is understandable. For an apparently successful builder to take his own life is a rare case, and the suicide note he left behind has opened up a can of worms.

Parmar, allegedly, was a victim of corruption and extortion. He had initially written down a few names but later struck them out, fearing the harm these people might cause to his family after his death.

The murky world of real estate, flush with black money, turned out to be a tough place even for Parmar, who was the director of Cosmos Group and president of Maharashta Chamber of Housing Industry.

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It’s not that the realtor was a clean man himself, but his death has led to a demonstration by the builders who took the opportunity to highlight the causes that drove him to shoot himself. Like the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) too is steeped in corruption. The culture of bribe-giving and taking is so endemic that no developer can get his project approved without going through the motions.

At every step, there is a price to be paid to obtain necessary clearances. The ‘Golden Gang’, a group of corporators and civic officials, calls the shots and builders are bound to cough up exorbitant sums to avoid harassment. This expenditure, so to speak, is then passed on to home buyers. That explains why real estate in Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai is so prohibitively expensive.

It is not that municipal corporations in other Indian cities are fair and transparent, but the urban centres of Maharashtra are extreme cases — where monstrous amounts of money change hands. The builder lobby is powerful in the state because of the generous political patronage it receives in lieu of bribes it pays to legislators to regularise unauthorised construction.

The builder-politican-civic officials nexus is so well-entrenched that it is virtually impossible to break the connection between money and political power. 

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Parmar, too, was playing by the rules of the game till he found the going difficult. He was constantly being hounded for money while several of his projects were stalled. He had earlier paid a few politicians and civic officials but the demands kept growing. Finally, he ended his life to escape from financial difficulties. 

It would be naïve to think that his suicide will bring an end to malpractices in TMC or force the state government to take radical measures in other civic bodies. However, the ministry of housing and urban development’s plan to put in place a single window time-bound clearance system for layout approvals and building permissions by the beginning of next year, is hailed as an effective antidote to corruption.

The proverbial tip of the iceberg that the suicide has exposed was already widely known. In terms of corruption, the TMC is ranked third along with the Thane zilla parishad, preceded by the Thane police and the revenue department. In 2014 the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) arrested 36 people in 20 cases of bribery in the TMC. This year till now only five persons have been caught red-handed. One reason for fewer arrests in 2015 could be the result of the ACB’s failure to encourage more people to report cases of corruption. 

In the lucrative real-estate business, builders have always found it convenient to allow money to do the talking. Their protests against civic officials and corporators in the wake of Parmar’s suicide is a desperate attempt to reduce the quantum of bribe so that their profit margin goes up. That’s the crux of the matter.