A fire on Tuesday gutted the headquarters of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) building in Bandra, raising speculations that it could be an attempt to destroy evidence of discrepancies in various slum rehabilitation schemes. The fire occurred at 6.30 pm on Tuesday evening while there was no one in office.
A fire on Tuesday gutted the headquarters of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) building in Bandra, raising speculations that it could be an attempt to destroy evidence of discrepancies in various slum rehabilitation schemes. The fire occurred at 6.30 pm on Tuesday evening while there was no one in office.
The building’s watchman spotted flames emanating out of the building and informed MHADA authorities, who in turn, informed the police. Till the time the copy was filed, the fire brigade was busy dousing the fire. Fire officials said eight fire engines, five water tankers and three ambulances were pressed into service.
Chief Fire Officer Kiran Kadam said, “It is too early to comment on the cause of fire. Fire fighting operations are still underway. We will file a report after completing investigations.”
SRA chief Debashish Chakra-borty, present at the site, flayed the sabotage talks as baseless.
Meanwhile, officials from the Kherwadi police station recorded Chakraborty’s statement.
Fears are being expressed that the fire may have gutted documents currently being sought by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) for its probe into alleged corruption by government officials and private developers in the multi-crore redevelopment projects. Interestingly, on Thursday, the ongoing litigation will come up for hearing before the Mumbai High Court.
The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has ordered enquires for 11 of the 250 cases of malpractices in slum rehabilitation and has procured documents of fraud in three cases. Even ACB sleuths DNA spoke to smelt a rat in the fire incident.
SRA engineer S Tripathi said, “The ACB enquiries are largely to do with discrepancies found in the eligibility list of slum-dwellers. The matter is to do with the land owning authority and not SRA which executes the project. SRA only issues construction permission for slum rehabilitation after getting the eligibility list from the concerned authorities.”
ACB probe so far points out to the reluctance by the Slum Redevelopment Authority (SRA) to share the documents with the ACB thus far.
While only the papers related to three SRA sanctioned projects in the city have been handed over to the ACB by the SRA so far, the documents for another eight, where open enquiries have been launched by the bureau, have also been sought from the SRA Interestingly, an earlier plea by the ACB to the SRA for sharing the documents pertaining to all the approved redevelopment schemes in Mumbai met with a stiff resistance that was supported by the state housing department.
(with inputs from Ashwin Aghor)
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