No housewarming yet for MHADA lottery winners

8 months after authority found the documents of 425 lottery winners to be fake, the remaining 3,000-odd winners still await a provisional offer letter

Almost 90 per cent of the 3,500-odd applicants who struck gold in the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) lottery last May have been waiting since then to cross the threshold of the houses they won.



But after the authority found that around 425 of them had submitted fake documents, the hopes of the guiltless have also been in limbo for the past eight months.

There is only one question they are interested in: Will the authority issue a provisional offer letter (POL) to the lottery winners now?

Soon after MHADA had got a whiff about a possible scam in the making, they formed a committee to scrutinise the documents of the 425 people accused of furnishing fraud papers.

During this period, over 3,000 winners who were in the clear were also not given any POL. They had submitted their documents to MHADA for verification immediately after bagging the houses in lottery and are still waiting for the letter.

A MHADA official informed
MiD DAY: "From Monday, we will start sending the POL to the successful applicants of the lottery that was held in May, 2011 so they can go ahead with the procedure of making the payment to MHADA in order to take possession of the houses."

'Stalling'
The authorities had warned the 425 accused that their houses would be given to those in waiting, if they fail to appear before the committee and prove their eligibility.


MiD DAY's Oct 15, 2011 report

Only 104 of them turned up for the hearing, and said they were eligible and would provide the documents.

The deadline for submitting the committee report was January 8, but the committee has sought an extension of two more months.

Sources in the authority alleged that seeking and extension is nothing but an attempt to help culprits and agents wiggle out of the allegations by somehow proving their eligibility.

The work of the construction of the houses that were released in May 2011 lottery is near completion at Malad, Magathane, Shailendra Nagar (Dahisar), Shimpoli (Borivli), Vinobha Bhave Nagar (Kurla), Mankhurd and Powai.
These 4,034 houses were released in the lottery of May 2011.