“If a poor man’s transit home has been bought by another poor man, then I don’t think it’s illegal,” this is what the chairman of MHADA’s Mumbai Repair and Reconstruction Board, Prasad Lad, told mid-day on Wednesday.

Live and let live? Prateeksha Nagar, Sion, has the highest concentration of transit camps. (Inset) Prasad Lad, Chairman of MHADA’s Mumbai Repair and Reconstruction Board. File Pic/Sameer Markande

And it doesn’t end there. Lad has, in an official note to the Chief Minister, recommended that even though thousands of families residing in these transit camps houses are illegal occupants, they should be accommodated in other transit camps on humanitarian grounds.

As per MHADA records, there are some 20,000 transit homes in the city and nearly 8,500 of these are occupied by illegal encroachers. If Lad’s recommendation is accepted by the government, the ruling Congress-NCP combine would benefit in elections as most of the transit camps are concentrated in specific areas.

What Lad seems to have forgotten, however, is that the poor man he is referring to doesn’t have the right to sell the transit home he has been allotted by MHADA. Transit accommodation is given on a temporary basis to residents of cessed buildings that have collapsed or been declared too dangerous to reside in. A resident of a transit home, therefore, has no ownership rights on the flat, which is the government’s property.