BMC OC Amnesty Scheme Exposes Mumbai’s Housing Paperwork Crisis

Mumbai’s BMC OC Amnesty Scheme was designed to bring thousands of buildings closer to formal compliance, but fewer than 10 applications in nearly two months suggest that the city’s occupation-certificate problem is not simply a matter of missing information. It is also a problem of documentation, cost, institutional responsibility and uncertainty over what the civic body will actually regularise.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation issued the revised standard operating procedure for the scheme on September 8, 2026. The concession window is scheduled to remain open for six months, until March 8, 2027. Yet the response has remained negligible even as estimates suggest that a large number of Mumbai buildings are functioning without Occupation Certificates, or OCs.

The scale of the problem itself is disputed. Industry estimates put the number of OC-less buildings at around 19,000, while the BMC’s own estimate is understood to be considerably lower, at approximately 4,500. That difference is not a minor statistical variation. It points to an unresolved question at the centre of the scheme: how many buildings does the civic administration believe are genuinely eligible for a route to compliance, and how many are outside it because their construction or records do not meet the prescribed conditions?