WHO WOULD RUN UBRA — AND HOW MANY RESIDENTS MUST SAY YES

UBRA कोण चालवणार आणि किती रहिवाशांची संमती लागणार? HPT LEGAL DESK | ANALYSIS Every demolition season revives the same question: who decides, and on whose consent? The proposed Unauthorised Buildings Rehabilitation Authority — UBRA — answers both by borrowing the architecture that has already housed over 2.45 lakh families through Maharashtra's Slum Rehabilitation Authority, and adapting it to residents who bought, in good faith, into buildings later found unlawful. Under the framework this series has been building part by part, UBRA could stand as its own statute or as an amendment to the SRA Act. It would establish a dedicated Authority with a governing body chaired by the Chief Minister or the Housing Minister, drawing members from the Housing, Urban Development, Revenue, Environment, Finance and Planning departments, alongside representatives of civil society. A Chief Executive Officer would run administrative divisions mapped to the state's major regions — Mumbai and the MMR, Pune, Nashik, Nagpur and Marathwada — mirroring how the SRA itself is organised for scale. The pivot point, as in slum rehabilitation, is consent. The proposal would require between 51% and 70% of a building's affected homeowners to agree before its rehabilitation plan can proceed — a band calibrated deliberately: high enough to demonstrate genuine buy-in from the residents concerned, low enough that a small block of hold-outs cannot freeze the majority indefinitely. Once that threshold is crossed, residents would form a cooperative housing society, which becomes the project's legal proponent in place of the informal or unauthorised structure that existed before. From there, the mechanics follow the SRA playbook closely. On identification of an eligible building, a moratorium on demolition would take effect while the Authority surveys the structure, verifies documentation and prepares a rehabilitation plan in consultation with residents. A developer would then be appointed — either through competitive bidding or self-development with technical assistance — and the Authority would sanction the additional Floor Space Index that finances the scheme, issuing commencement and occupation certificates that override other local approvals to keep the process moving. A dedicated tribunal would hear residents' grievances over wrongful exclusion from the eligible list, construction quality, or delay, with a requirement that its decisions be transparent and reasoned. The financing logic is what makes the scheme viable without a direct fiscal burden on the state: additional FSI is the currency of rehabilitation. For every square foot of free rehabilitation housing built, the developer earns a corresponding entitlement of square footage to sell on the open market — the same cross-subsidy that has funded slum rehabilitation projects across the state since 1995. Whether that ratio proves generous enough to attract serious developers to unauthorised-building sites, which are often smaller and more legally tangled than slum parcels, is a question this series will return to in a later part on the financial model. It bears repeating, as it will in every instalment of this series: UBRA does not exist in law today. This is a proposed framework being argued for in these pages, drawing on the SRA's record and on documented crises — including the 2025 Kalyan-Dombivli scandal, where 65 buildings were found to have been constructed using forged RERA certificates, affecting an estimated 6,500 homebuyers who had no way of knowing the paperwork was false. Readers should treat every entitlement, consent figure and safeguard described here as advocacy for a future law, not as a right that exists today.

प्रस्तावित 'अनधिकृत इमारती पुनर्वसन प्राधिकरण' (UBRA) स्वतंत्र कायदा म्हणून किंवा SRA कायद्यात दुरुस्ती करून स्थापता येईल. मुख्यमंत्री किंवा गृहनिर्माण मंत्र्यांच्या अध्यक्षतेखालील नियामक मंडळ, गृहनिर्माण-नगरविकास-महसूल-पर्यावरण-वित्त-नियोजन विभाग व नागरी समाजाचे प्रतिनिधी यांचा त्यात समावेश असेल. मुंबई/MMR, पुणे, नाशिक, नागपूर व मराठवाड्यासाठी स्वतंत्र विभागीय रचना असेल. संमतीचा निकष कळीचा — SRA प्रमाणेच बाधित घरमालकांपैकी किमान ५१% ते ७०% यांची संमती मिळाल्यावरच योजना पुढे जाईल. संमतीनंतर रहिवासी सहकारी संस्था स्थापन करतील, पाडकामावर स्थगिती येईल आणि प्राधिकरण वाढीव FSI मंजूर करेल — शासनावर थेट आर्थिक भार न टाकता, विक्रीयोग्य जागेतून योजना स्वयंपूर्ण होईल. वगळणी, बांधकाम दर्जा व विलंबाबाबतचे वाद स्वतंत्र न्यायाधिकरण ऐकेल. २०२५ मधील कल्याण-डोंबिवली येथील बनावट RERA प्रमाणपत्रांच्या घोटाळ्यात ६५ इमारती बाधित झाल्या व सुमारे ६,५०० घरखरेदीदार प्रभावित झाले — अशा सद्भावी खरेदीदारांसाठीच UBRA चा युक्तिवाद मांडला जात आहे. UBRA ही प्रस्तावित चौकट आहे, सध्या लागू कायदा नाही, हे वाचकांनी लक्षात घ्यावे.