47 years on, Andheri gets back road after building wall is razed

MUMBAI: The civic body traced a 47-year-old building file, which was missing, to demolish a society’s compound wall and join two sections of the 60ft road in

Andheri east

.

The Scindia society has two buildings located on the opposite sides of the 60ft road parallel to Western Express Highway behind

Rustamjee Natraj

(earlier Natraj Studio). The road was supposed to connect Andheri-Kurla Road to NS Phadke Road, but the society had usurped a portion of the road and converted it into their compound. It constructed a boundary wall blocking one side of the road and society gate at on another end.

The 60ft road was a proposed road in the earlier

Development Plan

(DP). The builder was supposed to hand over the road to the BMC in 1969. But it never happened and motorists started taking a detour to travel from one end of the 60ft road to another. Earlier the society claimed that the portion usurped belonged to them and the civic corporation had no documents to establish their claim. Some years ago, the civic body wanted to lay an underground pipeline for which they forcibly demolished the compound wall. The society approached the court. Since the BMC could not produce the relevant documents to prove that the usurped portion was part of a public road, the court passed an order against the BMC. The civic body was then forced to reconstruct the wall.

Left red-faced by the fiasco, the civic officials decided to trace the missing building file. They started searching for it among the 50-year-old records in different departments. They managed to trace the building proposal papers from records of different civic departments.

“We got the 1967 building proposal map, which helped us reconstruct the missing file. After constructing the building in 1969, the builder was supposed to hand over the land to us but he failed to do so. The society was using the usurped land as its premises,” said a civic official. “The society was filling Right to Information requests, seeking the building file although they were aware that it was missing. They were not allowing us to enter the premises saying that it was a private property. But the reconstructed records show that the encroached premises was part of the public road. The file helped us establish our claim and demolish the wall,” said assistant municipal commissioner D K Jain.

The BMC will open the road for motorists soon.