Days after Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray publicly criticised the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's draft development plan (DP), Congress jumped on the detractors' bandwagon, with Congress former MP Shabana Azmi calling the DP a 'disaster plan' on Tuesday.

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Speaking to around 150 people present at a public meeting organised by Mumbai Regional Congress Committee chief Sanjay Nirupam, Azmi called for a 'jan andolan' to trash the DP.

"The DP has left out the slum population completely. These are the people who run the city. It is development at whose cost?" said Azmi, adding that the plan ignored the most problematic civic issues like affordable housing and infrastructure.

The FSI regime proposed in the DP is completely builder-oriented," Azmi told the audience. "The DP has focussed on vertical housing and not on amenities."

She said that various project-affected people should not be rehabilitated in slum rehab programmes like SRA, which is a "failed scheme".Another of the party's erstwhile MPs, Priya Dutt, said the DP ignored the problems faced by pedestrians. She also said there are not enough schools in eastern Bandra as compared to the west side.

Architect and planner PK Das, who was part of the meeting, said the draft DP should be scrapped. He suggested that in order to make housing affordable in the city, the government can build 10 lakh homes on public land, adding that Mhada owns 2,000 hectare in the city.

A senior civic official from the planning department said, "Political parties were part of the process of framing the DP. As far as amenities are concerned, the entire concept of pooling a certain percentage of land bigger than 2,000 sq m was introduced for the purpose of providing amenities."