Mumbai: Litigation over land and reliance on private builders could defeat the Maharashtra government’s goal to build nearly two million affordable houses in the Mumbai metropolitan region by 2022, at least three officials in the state’s urban development department said.

In May, the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government had announced that it will build 1.9 million houses in the region, as part of its Housing For All initiative.

Large tracts of land in Mumbai and the larger metropolitan region are locked in a legal dispute between the government and builders.

Until the state repealed its land ceiling law in 2007, individuals in urban areas could own more than 500 sq. m residential land only if they permitted public housing in 5% of the excess land.

Such land, which developers should have handed over to public housing but didn’t, adds up to around 1,850 acres in Greater Mumbai (the municipal city limits) and another 4,000 acres in the larger metropolitan region.

The government has laid claim to this land even though the law has been repealed, since developers did not use it for public housing when it was in force.

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But officials at the urban development department said the government was chasing an unrealistic target. These officials, who did not want to be named given the political pitch made by the government for affordable housing, said the lack of adequate land could undermine the programme.

“The affordable housing scheme is highly dependent on the private developers because the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority is not well-equipped to fully meet this challenge. Ironically, the government expects the private developers to provide affordable housing now when they never followed this programme while the Urban Land Ceiling Regulation (ULCR) Act was in force,” one of the officials cited above said.

Another official, who is part of the team specifically brought in by the current government to speed up pending urban land ceiling cases, pointed out that affordability depended a lot on when the land becomes available for construction.

“Even assuming that the government wins the case, construction of affordable housing on this land depends on the private developers because the government cannot construct houses. We will have to depend on the developers’ participation, but what is the incentive for them to keep the prices affordable,” said the official.