The Bombay High Court has termed as “strange” the Maharashtra government`s slum policy under which encroachers are given free tenement, and lamented that an international city like Mumbai is known for its slums. In a judgment passed on Tuesday, a division bench of Justice Girish Kulkarni and Justice Jitendra Jain said the state`s policy has resulted in large pockets of land being siphoned out from the “state pool”.

It also called for a “thorough introspection of such government policies, keeping in view the plight of the future generation who would suffer the ill effects of the state of affairs”. The court said once slums on private land are recognised under the Slum Act, strangely the encroachment on private land gets converted into a legitimate right of a free tenement to the encroacher under the slum policy of the state government, which, in our opinion, is as good as a premium on the illegality of the encroacher in encroaching on either private or public land.