Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
An 11-story building in the upscale Mumbai neighborhood of Juhu, empty pending a legal case, is one of many real estate projects said to be tainted in the Indian financial capital.
MUMBAI, India — The units in an apartment building being built in the upscale Mumbai neighborhood of Juhu promised to be both dazzling and odd: Each of the 33 homes in the 11-story building would come with a private lily pond, a car elevator and parking spaces for three cars next to the living room.
City officials and neighborhood residents say the parking spaces were a clever sham dreamed up by a developer and corrupt bureaucrats to skirt building rules and avoid paying millions of dollars in fees. The rooms for “parking,” which the developer did not have to account for because they were not considered living spaces, were sold to buyers as a way to add dining areas, extra rooms or whatever else they wanted.
The building, which remains empty awaiting the resolution of a legal case now at the Indian Supreme Court, is just one of scores of tainted real estate projects that analysts say have exposed a deep-rooted culture of corruption here in India’s financial capital. In recent years, when construction was booming along with the Indian economy, Mumbai, the nation’s most densely populated city, may have lost potential revenue of as much as 200 billion rupees, or $3.6 billion, a year because of such violations, said Subodh Kumar, Mumbai’s former city commissioner, the Indian equivalent of an American city manager.
“One thousand square feet became 2,000 or 3,000 depending on how well you could work the system,” said Mr. Kumar, who retired this year. “There was a huge industry of corruption.”
The payoffs and kickbacks would probably have continued for years to come, Mr. Kumar and others say, had it not been for a new chief minister of the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is the capital. This year the minister, Prithviraj Chavan, an appointed official, approved an overhaul of the city’s building permit system to make it more transparent. He stripped officials of the power to grant exemptions to favored builders and forced developers to pay fees for additions like balconies and parking spaces next to apartments.
Partly as a result, even as several big-ticket corruption scandals have deeply shaken public confidence in public officials elsewhere in India, many Mumbai residents and corporate executives say they have regained some hope for their city of 14 million, which many of them had despaired was becoming more dysfunctional by the day.
He “is one of the finest chief ministers we have had,” said Ashoke Pandit, a filmmaker whose neighborhood association flagged problems in numerous real estate projects, including the Juhu building. “He is a very honest, straightforward person. He has put a stop to all the nonsense and wrongs that have happened.”
Supporters say that Mr. Chavan, 66, and a handful of other reform-minded chief ministers in states like Bihar and Orissa offer one of the few hopeful signs during a particularly dark moment for India. In the last two years, the economy has slowed sharply, corruption scandals have mushroomed and many government agencies have proved incapable of carrying out basic functions.
These regional leaders, the Indian equivalent of the governor of an American state, face plenty of critics, and their success is far from guaranteed. Political rivals and real estate developers, for example, say that Mr. Chavan’s focus on eliminating corruption has come at the expense of greasing the wheels that allow for long-needed improvements.
Still, Mr. Chavan and the other chief ministers have been far more productive than the Parliament in New Delhi, which has been repeatedly paralyzed by recent scandals and political squabbles.
In Mumbai, the change in building rules is bringing in millions of dollar in extra revenue, officials say. That has helped put resources behind Mr. Chavan’s push for big public works projects like a 13-mile bridge that would offer another connection to this island city, across a wide bay to the mainland, opening up vast new tracts of land for housing and commercial development.
Indian Official Starts Pulling Up Corruption’s Roots in Mumbai
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Indian Official Starts Pulling Up Corruption’s Roots in Mumbai
