A SIGNATURE, NOT A VETO

EDITORIAL BOARD | NONE Two stories in this issue rhyme. In Thane, a society had to go to the High Court to make its federation part with a No-Objection Certificate — and even then, won relief confined strictly to its own share of the layout, on conditions it must still meet. In Mumbai, residents of MHADA colonies watched challenges to cluster redevelopment fall away, clearing a path that an authority, not any one society, will largely control. Different facts, one lesson: redevelopment in this region is gated less by statute than by consent held hostage, or by planning that no single party can unlock alone. The law already knows how to balance the individual and the collective. Dues are recoverable through ordinary process; majorities can be required before a scheme proceeds, as both the SRA framework and the proposed UBRA demonstrate; hold-outs can be overridden through due process rather than indefinite delay. What frustrates ordinary flat-owners is not the absence of a legal answer but the distance between what the law permits and how long the paperwork takes to catch up. A No-Objection Certificate was meant to certify that no genuine objection exists — not to function as a tollgate that a federation, a registrar or an authority can keep closed for reasons of its own convenience. This paper's position on all of this is narrow and, we hope, consistent from issue to issue. We do not tell readers whom to trust or which redevelopment route to sign onto — individual or cluster, self-redevelopment or builder-led. We report what courts and authorities actually decide, in the terms those bodies actually used, resisting the temptation, common enough in property journalism, to round a dismissed challenge up into an affirmative endorsement, or to describe a conditional order as an unconditional one. Where our reporting is still awaiting an order copy or a citation, we say so plainly on the page rather than filling the gap with confident-sounding prose. Nor do we name the guilty before a court has. This issue's report on an alleged buyer fraud in Mira-Bhayandar is written throughout in the language of allegation — because a bail refusal, however serious the underlying charge, is not a conviction, and this paper does not treat it as one. The remedy for a withheld signature, or for an accusation not yet tested, is not a headline. It is a clean record, a lawful order, and — where charges are involved — a verdict reached the way verdicts are meant to be reached.

या अंकातील दोन बातम्या एकच धडा देतात. ठाण्यात सोसायटीला NOC साठी न्यायालयात जावे लागले — आणि तेही केवळ स्वतःच्या जमिनीच्या वाट्यापुरते, अटींसह. मुंबईत समूह पुनर्विकासाविरोधातील याचिका फेटाळल्या गेल्या, आणि आता एका प्राधिकरणाच्या हाती नियोजनाची सूत्रे अधिक स्पष्टपणे आली. निष्कर्ष एकच — MMR मधील पुनर्विकास कायद्यापेक्षा रोखलेल्या संमतीमुळे अधिक अडतो. थकबाकी वसूल करता येते, बहुमत मागता येते, कायदेशीर प्रक्रियेने अडवणूक दूर करता येते — SRA व प्रस्तावित UBRA दोन्ही हेच दाखवतात. NOC म्हणजे 'कोणताही खरा आक्षेप नाही' याचे प्रमाणपत्र; तो अडवणुकीचा टोलनाका होता कामा नये. आम्ही कोणालाही दोषी न ठरवता, न्यायालय व प्रशासन जे प्रत्यक्ष ठरवते तेच, त्यांच्याच शब्दांत नोंदवतो — निकाल अद्याप हाती नसेल तर तसे स्पष्टपणे सांगतो.