'Shift slum residents on Mumbai airport land'

Having agreed to the privatisation of the Mumbai airport, the CPI(M) wants the government to rehabilitate the slum-dwellers who will be evicted for the expansion on airport land only.

CPI(M) Politburo member and MP Sitaram Yechury has written to Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel seeking his intervention in this regar

"You will recollect that when some of these lands were given to private hoteliers to establish luxury hotels, many of the slum-dwellers were relocated on the same lands in multi-storeyed buildings constructed by the hoteliers. Our late friend and colleague in the House, Shri Lalit Suri, had also done that," Yechury said in the letter, sent last week.

He sought the minister's intervention to ensure that nearly four lakh people living in the airport area were relocated "on the same pattern".

According to the Samiti memorandum to Yechury, about 80,000 structures over 275 hectares have to be removed for the modernisation of the airport. Relocation far away from the airport would result in people losing their livelihood, said the memorandum.

The senior CPI(M) leader had earlier taken up the cause of the people living in the vicinity of the Madras airport with the government.

Opposing the privatisation of the Madras airport, Yechury had argued that unlike the slum-dwellers living on airport land elsewhere, those living in the vicinity of the Madras airport had regularised houses and so could not be evicted.