Mumbai's D'Souza Mansion Residents in Distress with No Water & No Power!

Residents of Santacruz East's DSouza Mansion have been waiting it out in the building's small courtyard since Monday, when they lost both water and electricity. With the use of a generator, they have been able to operate one fan in each of the ten houses at night, and the kids have been using candles and torches to study for tests. Their building on their family land will be razed in a matter of days, leaving them without a place to call home, which is an even worse fate they fear.

Gracy D'Souza, 78, another resident, stated that she got the bruises on her arm when she prevented the police from turning off their water supply. The ground-plus-two-story building has two more bedridden senior tenants.

Because their building was classified as C-1, or dilapidated, and was going to be demolished, the BMC sent the residents an evacuation notice on March 11. On February 5, they received a Section 354 (demolition) notice from the city government. However, the residents argue otherwise, as is the case with many other properties that have a C-1 notice posted.

“The BMC and police barged in around noon on Monday to cut off our electricity supply,” said 81-year-old Mary Fernandez tearfully. “How do we live in such heat and amid mosquitos? They should just kill us.”

“We carried out structural audits at least thrice, the latest in 2023, all of which rated our building as C2B or repairable,” said Dennis D’Souza, an East Indian Catholic whose ancestors owned the mansion. “What is extraordinary is that the BMC first structural audit done in 2014—which categorised our building as C1—and our own audit which classified it as C2B, were signed by the same person, although through two different companies.”

 “The court asked the BMC’s technical advisory committee (TAC) to conduct another structural audit report in 2017. But they took till 2023 to come here, and through RTIs we found out that they had again rated our building as C1. In 2023, we redid our structural audit, as we’ve been repairing our building, and once again we have been categorised as C2B. The forgery case, meanwhile, has been moving at snail’s pace, with the builder mostly not showing up in court and being fined for it”, said D’Souza management.