The Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) scheme is one of Mumbai’s most consequential — and most contested — planning tools. Launched in December 1995 under the Slum Rehabilitation Act, it set out to solve a genuinely hard problem: with roughly half the city’s population living in slums at the time, there was no realistic way for the government alone to fund free housing at that scale. The SRA’s answer was to make land the resource — inviting private developers to build free housing for eligible slum dwellers in exchange for the right to construct and sell additional housing on the same land. Three decades on, it’s worth understanding both what this model has achieved and where it continues to struggle.
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How the scheme works
Under an SRA scheme, eligible slum dwellers receive a new, self-contained tenement — currently a minimum of 300 square feet of carpet area, up from 269 square feet in earlier years — entirely free of cost. To make this financially viable for a developer, the SRA grants incentive Floor Space Index (FSI) on the plot, along with Transferable Development Rights (TDR) that can be used or sold for construction elsewhere in the city. The developer recovers costs and earns a margin through the free-sale component: additional flats built on the same land and sold on the open market. In effect, the value of Mumbai’s most expensive resource — buildable land in the city — is what funds the free housing, rather than any direct government expenditure.
Implementing a scheme requires the consent of at least 75% of eligible slum dwellers on the plot, and eligibility itself is determined by a cutoff date — a slum structure must have existed before a specified date to qualify for free rehabilitation. That cutoff has moved over the years, from January 1, 1995 in the original policy to January 1, 2000 under later amendments, with each extension adding a fresh wave of eligible households and a fresh round of verification disputes.
The opportunity for developers
For developers, SRA projects offer access to well-located urban land that would otherwise be unavailable — slum clusters often sit on plots in established, well-connected parts of the city that have no other route to redevelopment. The incentive FSI and TDR on offer can be substantial, and a well-executed SRA project can be commercially attractive precisely because the land cost is effectively paid in kind (free housing) rather than in cash. The scheme has also evolved to make participation easier: common areas such as parking, staircases, lifts, and lift lobbies are now counted as part of the rehabilitation area rather than an added cost the developer absorbs separately, and in October 2025 the Maharashtra Cabinet approved a slum cluster redevelopment scheme aimed at enabling larger, more integrated SRA projects rather than fragmented, plot-by-plot ones.
The challenges for developers
The difficulty of SRA projects is rarely the regulatory framework on paper — it’s execution on the ground. Eligibility verification for hundreds or thousands of households is slow and frequently disputed, since it determines who gets a free flat and who doesn’t. Developers are also required to fund transit accommodation or a monthly rent for displaced residents until the new building is ready, which can stretch on for years if a project stalls, adding significant carrying cost. Since SRA’s inception, only around 2.36 lakh houses have actually been built against a far larger eligible population, and industry commentary has repeatedly pointed to a builder-centric approach, funding gaps, and litigation as the recurring reasons projects get stuck midway. Any developer entering an SRA project needs to underwrite these risks realistically rather than assuming the incentive FSI alone guarantees a smooth, profitable outcome.
The opportunity for slum dwellers
For an eligible slum-dwelling household, the scheme’s core promise is significant: a formal, self-contained, permanently owned home in the same neighbourhood, at no cost, with legal title in place of an informal structure. The SRA also mandates a one-time maintenance deposit of roughly ₹40,000 per tenement, paid by the developer into a corpus intended to fund the building’s upkeep for its first decade — a meaningful protection against a common failure mode in rehabilitation housing, where buildings fall into disrepair soon after handover because no maintenance fund exists.
The challenges for slum dwellers
The gap between policy and lived experience is where most of the scheme’s criticism concentrates. Households can wait years, sometimes over a decade, in transit accommodation while a project moves through approvals, construction, and — often — legal disputes, with rent payments from the developer that may be delayed or fall short of actual market rents. Construction quality in rehabilitation buildings has also been a persistent complaint, with recurring repair costs falling on residents even after the maintenance corpus period ends. And because eligibility hinges on documentary proof tied to a specific cutoff date, genuine long-term residents can find themselves excluded on technicalities, while the process itself is vulnerable to fraud and disputed claims — both of which routinely delay projects for everyone involved, eligible and ineligible alike.
What this means in practice
SRA projects sit at the intersection of genuinely good intentions, a workable financial model, and some of the most complex execution challenges in Mumbai real estate. Neither the developer’s opportunity nor the slum dweller’s protections are automatic — both depend heavily on how carefully a specific project is structured, documented, and managed from the outset. Whether you’re a developer evaluating an SRA opportunity or a stakeholder trying to understand what a scheme actually commits to, the details of eligibility, transit arrangements, and maintenance provisions are worth scrutinising well before any agreement is signed. This is exactly the kind of due diligence we help clients work through at Mungekar Realty — get in touch if you’d like to talk through a specific SRA opportunity.
Related reading: old building vs. cessed building vs. pagdi system, and a step-by-step guide to the redevelopment process.