In a sharp rebuke to the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), the Supreme Court has quashed the acquisition of prime Church-owned land in Bandra, making it clear that landowners cannot be elbowed out of the driver’s seat when it comes to redeveloping slum-affected properties.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Ujjal Bhuyan ruled that the Basilica of Our Lady of the Mount—owner of the disputed property—had been unfairly sidelined by the SRA, which instead championed a scheme fronted by a cooperative society of slum dwellers and its chosen developer.
The case centered on a 1,596 sq. m. parcel of land in Bandra, home to hutments since the 1930s and notified as a slum decades ago. While residents had tied up with Saldanha Real Estate in 2019 to push their own redevelopment plan, the Church trust countered with a broader vision: a composite project spanning its entire 10,000 sq. m. property.
Despite this, the SRA dismissed the trust’s proposal in 2021 on a technicality, claiming it wasn’t in the prescribed format and that the trust had missed the statutory deadline. It pressed ahead with acquisition proceedings under the Maharashtra Slum Areas Act, effectively stripping the Church of its rights.
The Bombay High Court intervened in 2024, striking down the acquisition. Unhappy with that outcome, the society, the developer, and the SRA took the battle to the Supreme Court.
Their defense rested on two pillars: that the trust had long ignored the plight of slum dwellers, and that the 2018 amendments to the Slums Act shifted the responsibility squarely onto landowners to initiate redevelopment.
But the apex court wasn’t persuaded. The bench agreed with the Church’s stance that its proposal was timely, especially when factoring in COVID-related extensions to limitation periods. It also refused to let procedural nitpicking eclipse the substantive right of a landowner to redevelop its own land.
“The owner of a Slum Rehabilitation Area has a preferential right to develop it, and without giving due opportunity to exercise that right, the State or the SRA cannot proceed to acquire the land,” the Court declared.
Condemning the SRA’s move as arbitrary and unfair, the judges found that the authority, the housing society, and the developer had worked in lockstep to sideline the trust. Such conduct, the Court held, fatally tainted the acquisition process.
In reaffirming the Bombay High Court’s ruling, the Supreme Court has drawn a firm line: statutory rights of landowners cannot be sacrificed at the altar of expediency or developer-driven schemes.
