Maharashtra govt orders safety audit of SRA homes

The state government has ordered an audit of all the houses built under the SRA (Slum Rehabilitation Authority) scheme to ensure that they are in good condition.

According to sources, the government wanted to ensure that these tenements, a few of which are two decades old, are safe. The housing department will rope in engineers from top educational institutes, such as IIT or VJTI, to audit the SRA buildings.

“Under the SRA scheme, we found that buildings built for sale were of good quality and still in a good condition. But a few of the SRA houses are not in top shape as the builders did not use best quality material during construction,” the source said.

There are 6,000 SRA buildings in Mumbai with 1.27 lakh tenements housing 6.35 lakh people. Each tenement is around 270 sqft. The housing department secretary said the government is keen to carry out the audit before the monsoons.

In 1995, the government launched the SRA scheme under which builders were given plots where slums existed with the mandate to house the slum dwellers and use the extra available space to construct buildings and sell flats commercially, thus recover the cost of the slum rehabilitation and also earn profits.