NTC forms panel for rehabilitating people living on mill land, says Piyush Goyal

Mumbai, Jan 15 (PTI) To expedite the redevelopment of the mill land, the National Textile Corporation (NTC) has formed a committee to study and suggest ways for rehabilitating the people living in the premises of nine of its defunct mills in the central areas of the megapolis, Union industry and commerce minister Piyush Goyal said on Sunday.

The city is home nearly a dozen shuttered cotton/textile mills and tens of thousands of people still live in the dilapidated hutments/chawls in these mill premises.
National Textile Corporation, along with the Maharashtra government, including Mhada and MMRDA, has formed a committee to speed up the redevelopment of the land under nine of its mills in the city, Goyal told reporters without specifying which are those mills being identified.

The minister said these nine mills house 1,860 chawls housing tens of thousands of people and the job of the committee is only rehabilitation and not redevelopment.
These nine mills can release 56,000 square meters of land for redevelopment, he said, adding there are 11 chawls on the non-mill land parcels as well.
Goyal further said the said committee has already appointed realty consultant Cushman & Wakefield to submit a plan on rehabilitation of these chawls. They will not report on redevelopment of the land parcels where there are chawls, he specified.

The Centre has also asked Maharashtra to convert non-cessed buildings to cessed ones so that the rehabilitation and the ensuing redevelopment can be expedited.
Goyal expects the panel to complete the inspection of the identified land banks over the next few weeks by that time Cushman & Wakefiled will also submit their report.

Over the next 30-45 days, there will be some significant development, he said, adding the whole process will have the active involvement of both the state’s housing body Mhada and the Mumbai planning body MMRDA.

Till about the middle of the last century the city had over 130 cotton mills, the first of which was Bombay Spinning Mill set up by Cowasji Nanabhai Davar in 1854. But today none of them are functional today their ruins covered with moss are the only remaining traces of its mill culture and history.

As the city grew they lost their sheen and the Great Bombay textile strike of 1982, was the last nail on the long history if the city’s origin.

Some of these mills in central Mumbai have already been redeveloped into spanky malls, residential and commercial towers.

Some of the noted redevelopments are the High Street Phoenix Mall in Lower Parel, which has a spanky shopping mall a five-star hotel, a multiplex, commercial space, and a residential tower. Phoenix Mill’s history dates back to 1905.

Another is the nearby plush Kamala City business park which used to be Kamala Mills. And the country’s tallest residential tower, the Palais Royale in nearby Worli, is built on the remnants of the Shree Ram Mills.