Mumbai: The Maharashtra government aims to complete over 30 percent of the Bombay Development Directorate (BDD) redevelopment project—one of the state government’s most ambitious and severely delayed urban renewal projects in Mumbai—by the end of 2026.
The Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, the state government agency implementing the project, will hand over the keys to 4,888 houses for the rehabilitation of residents of the century-old BDD chawls by the end of 2026, Sanjeev Jaiswal, MHADA Vice President and Chief Executive Officer, said Monday.
Overall, the MHADA needs to build 15,593 houses to complete the rehabilitation of all residents. The agency has a 2029 deadline for the project, work on which started in earnest in 2017.
Sanjeev Jaiswal was speaking at a function for the handover of keys to 864 tenements at Naigaon’s BDD chawls.
The British established the BDD chawls in the early 1920s as low-cost, small homes for mill workers and labourers, who worked at the docks, as well as junior government employees.
Not only have the buildings become decrepit over the years, but the size of the families living in the small 160-square-foot houses has also grown, making redevelopment a necessity. The redeveloped houses span a 500-square-foot area.
Spread across four locations—Worli, Naigaon (Dadar), NM Joshi Marg (Lower Parel), and Sewri, a predominantly Marathi-speaking belt—the BDD chawls cover over 34 hectares of prime land in the island city of Mumbai.
The Sewri chawls, however, are not part of the BDD revamp project, as they fall under the jurisdiction of the Mumbai Port Trust, thereby remaining under the central government.
‘63% of the project is in an advanced stage’
The revamp of BDD chawls has been in the pipeline for over two decades. However, the ball was only set rolling in 2016 when the Maharashtra government appointed MHADA as the nodal agency to implement the project using an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) model, commonly known as a cash contract.
Of the roughly 207 BDD chawls, 195, including 121 chawl buildings in Worli, 42 in Naigaon, and 32 at NM Joshi Marg, are within the redevelopment project scope. Every floor in each chawl building has at least 80 tenements, which are 160 square feet in size.
The cost estimate of the project is Rs 17,085.64 crore, according to MHADA.
In August 2025, the MHADA handed over the first set of completed houses to 556 families in the Worli BDD chawls. On Monday, it handed over the second set of houses to 864 families living in the Naigaon BDD chawls.
Sanjeev Jaiswal said the third instalment of the handover is scheduled for April this year—the MHADA will then hand over the keys to another 845 houses, in Worli.
With that, MHADA would have handed over 2,285 of the total 15,593 houses.
“Moreover, another 7,550 tenements are at an advanced stage of completion. This means 63 percent of the houses have either been fully constructed or are on their way to completion,” Jaiswal said, speaking at Monday’s event.
“We are planning to start work on the remaining 5,778 houses by October this year,” Jaiswal added.
‘30% by this year, 40% by next’
According to Sanjeev Jaiswal, 4,888 houses—31.5 percent of the project scope—would have been handed over by December 2026. Most will be in the Worli BDD chawls—the largest of the three BDD chawl locations that are part of the revamp plan.
At the Worli BDD chawls, apart from the 556 houses handed over in August 2025 and the 845 set to be handed over in April 2026, the MHADA plans to complete and hand over the keys to 574 houses in May this year, and by July 2026, 271 more houses.
The Naigaon BDD chawls will see another handover ceremony after 537 more houses are completed in May this year.
Meanwhile, at the NM Joshi Marg site, the first set of 547 houses is set for a June 2026 handover. There will be two more such events, in October and December, with the tally of completed houses reaching 1,241 by the end of this year.
“Next year, similarly, 1,358 more houses will be ready in phases, taking the total number of completed tenements to 6,246, which is 40 percent of the scope of the overall project,” Jaiswal said, adding that MHADA’s target is to fast-track and complete the whole project by 2029.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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