The Bombay Rents, Hotel and Lodging House Rates Control Act, 1947 was passed amid the wartime and Partition housing shortage to protect tenants from eviction and profiteering. It fixed "standard rent" at the level payable on 1 September 1940, allowing only narrow increases for taxes, cesses and repairs. Conceived as a temporary measure, it was extended repeatedly and survived until the Maharashtra Rent Control Act 1999 replaced it. With rents pegged to 1940 values, landlords lost any incentive to maintain buildings, producing tens of thousands of decaying "cessed" chawls and tenements in the island city, patched from a statutory repair cess collected by MHADA.
Rent control froze the property market of India's densest city for half a century, immobilising tenancies in central Bombay while pushing new housing into the suburbs and into informal settlement. Together with a low FSI cap it is the standard explanation for Mumbai's peculiar combination of extreme land values, low-rise decay and permanent redevelopment politics.
See it on the timeline →