By our correspondent, Surat, 1 February 2013

Firmly moving ahead in the direction of achieving the target of ‘zero slum’ status, the city of Surat on Thursday completed demolition of 125 slum houses in Limbayat zone’s Kamrunagar. The Surat Municipal Corporation(SMC) is planning to build Economically weaker Section (EWS) housing on this land to relocate the slum dwellers. The demolition task was started on 30th January and was completed on 31st.

The task of clearing this 20,000 sq meter land was important not just in connection with the Zero slum plan, but also because it makes a way for starting redevelopment works in the khaadi area.

The task to achieve the zero slum status is not so smooth everywhere like Karmunagar. Take an instance of Mafatnagar slum demolition case pending in the Supreme Court. The SMC has recently received a notice in this case. Mafatbagar demolition was challenged by one Vitthal Senupan through local lawyer Zamir Sheikh.

The SMC has initiated the Rs 33 lakh socio economic survey task covering 400 slum areas of Surat in a bid to make the city as ‘zero slum city’. According to the draft budget recently proposed by the Commissioner, the survey task will be over by March this year.

The SMC has handed over the task of ‘Web Based GIS Application’ at a cost of Rs 4.11 crore for preparing total station survey, contour survey, plain table survey, geo reference digitized mapping, basic infrastructure marking etc.

According to an estimate , Surat city has more than 1 lakh slum dwellers living in slums located in different parts of the city. Nearly 60 per cent of these slums were or are located on Government land.SMC started an exercise to relocate these slum dwellers to EWS houses in 2010 and cleared the major portion of illegal encroachments on the bank of the Tapi river in recent years. While clearing the slums located on Government or SMC land is easier, the issue of slum located on private properties is relatively complicated.

Related links: Slum upgradation scheme of Surat Municipal Corporation
Surat eyes BMC model on slum redevpt (2009)
SMC razes 2800 slums to give Tapi a facelift (2010)
Surat closer to dream as slum rehabilitation, phase 2 begins(2011)
JNNURM clears Rs 27 cr for Surat slum projects
SMC begins exercise for construction of 6000 EWS houses(2012)