At least 65,155 sqmt of Bombay Dyeing must go for public good, rules apex court.
In what may come as good news for workers of defunct mills awaiting affordable houses, the supreme court has ordered the Nusli Wadia-owned Bombay Dyeing Textile Mills to hand over at least 65154.93 sqmt of the prime unused land in the space-crunched city to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) for the purpose of “utilising spare land for public good”.
Disposing of the company’s lawsuit against an earlier Bombay HC judgment, the apex court has given the sick mill’s management at Wadala and Prabhadevi six month for giving up possession of the steeply-priced land to the agencies.
In case the company “fails to hand over the said land, the MCGB and MHADA shall be at liberty to forcibly take possession of the concerned lands’’, ruled the SC bench of justices RM Lodha and Anil R Dave.
It has been reported that the textile mills at Prabhadevi in Lower and Spring Mills at Dadar Naigaon in Wadala are sick mills owned by Bombay Dyeing.
One crucial corollary of the SC order is that Bombay Dyeing would be forced to give up the huge chunk of land to the authorities so that houses for mill workers can be built on it.
According to the Bombay HC judgment, the Bombay Dyeing Textile Mills land, which was allowed the running of cotton textile mills as an industrial user, could not have been developed or redeveloped for commercial or residential purposes.
Several closed or sick cotton textile mills in the city are now desirous of redevelopment for commercial or residential purpose for generating funds, observed high court chief justice Roshan Dalvi in response to the company’s challenging of the state’s policy on sick mill lands.
In 1966, the Maharashtra government enacted the Control of Development for Use of Land in the wake of “the deteriorating condition of the textile units and need to have open green spaces for public purpose” and came out with a policy “to free open mill lands for development and or redevelopment’’.
This policy envisaged that the sick or closed cotton textile mills wanting to go for modernisation were to be granted permission for development and/or redevelopment of its lands for commercial and/or residential user would be allowed to proceed with their plan but with certain conditions, one of them being that the company would give the possession of the land on the basis of the open area created from razing the dilapidated mill structures that once employed hundreds of workers round-the-clock.
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