India, Dec. 7 -- Mandeep Singh Makkar was indignant when he thought the civic administration had classified his Chandivali neighbourhood as a slum. And then the penny dropped. With civic elections around the corner, all bets are off.

It explained why tenders have been awarded for tiling and building passageway work in his neighbourhood, L ward, with funding from the Mumbai Slum Improvement Board (MSIB), under MHADA.

On closer scrutiny, Makkar found that as many as 19 tenders had been awarded, citing "ladikaran and construction of passage". All of them had an identical budgetary allocation of Rs.40.93 lakh. Another 10 tenders citing the same kind of work showed identical costs of Rs.21.08 lakh.

"How can funds under the slum improvement ...