Civic body's pilot project for risky buildings a failure

THANE: Over a year after it put in place a geospatial system to map unsafe buildings and improve its response time in case of a collapse, the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC) has managed to rehabilitate just 10% of the families living under threat in these structures.
Of the 1,219 families targeted as part of the pilot project initiated following the fatal collapse in Mumbra last year, TMC has relocated only 139 that were analyzed and mapped as part of the study.
The project covered a total of 65 unsafe structures across areas of Mumbra, Wagle, Uthalsar, Naupada, Vartaknagar, Kalwa, Majiwada, Railadevi, and Kopari.
Of the 788 families targeted in Mumbra, only 76 were shifted to alternative homes. Similarly, just four out of 133 in Kalwa and 35 shifted from Wagle, home to 159 dangerous structures.
Civic officials said that they failed to relocate the families for lack of transit homes in Thane.
The poor result of the pilot also reflects on the larger problem plaguing Thane - too many unsafe structures, but fewer transit tenements available with the corporation to temporary move those living under fear of death.
The TMC has recently demanded a total of 15,000 tenements from the state and central government for its future cluster schemes.
The pilot was undertaken to do an advanced analytics of the rickety structures, map them and then build a geo-enabled urban infrastructure for the areas dotted with old buildings.
This then could help in reducing the response time to building collapses in future. The mapping is to also help the TMC demolition department to process and bring down an unsafe structure early.
Thane has an estimated 2 lakh illegal buildings, many of which are in poor structural conditions due to old age and lack of maintenance.
The TMC has proposed a Rs4-crore cluster redevelopment scheme to revive the entire old city. The mapping and geo-analyses are being done to lay the ground work before the launch of the state's ambitious cluster schemes for Thane.