Transforming Mumbai into Shanghai seems to be a distant reality. And going by the Maharashtra government’s performance, it will take considerable time to reach even half way up that ladder. For the state to fund Mumbai’s infrastructure development projects, it must repeal the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act or ULCRA soon. The state government was supposed to table the ULC agenda in the recent monsoon session of the state legislature, but chose to postpone the decision for the second time in a row.

The ULC Act, promulgated as a socialist measure in 1976 during the Emergency, allows for the takeover of surplus vacant land over 500 sq metres in metros. Now, thanks to its indecisiveness, the government is yet to receive a whopping Rs 12,800 crore through the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM). These funds are to help speed up Mumbai’s infrastructure development such as rebuilding its creaking sewers that can’t cope with rainwater flooding anymore.

“The Act has locked up huge chunks of land in legal wrangles and has become a bottleneck in clearances of project proposals,” says Nawab Mullick, Maharashtra’s former housing minister. In 1999, the Vajpayee government repealed the Act, but state legislatures were also required to pass repeal bills. Most states did, except Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal.

Niranjan Hiranandani, a prominent builder in Mumbai, has been spearheading the demand for the repeal of the ULC Act since 1999. “Repeated postponements of repealing the Act have cost the state dear in thousands of crores of development funds from the Centre,” he says. As a builder, Hiranandani could have vested interests, too. If the state repeals the Act this December, both landholders and big builders will benefit as all acquisition proceedings (of about 17,000 acres) will be dropped.