He told Sandeep Unnithan why he is the best bet for this constituency where he takes on the Congress candidate Bhanwarsinh Rajpurohit for a second time. In a sense, Purohit the minister of state for housing in the Shiv Sena-BJP government, may yet be pitted against Deora, given the latter's poll offensive against the state government for allegedly harming the interests of the tenants.

Why are you not contesting the South Mumbai seat as you had indicated earlier?

Well, I wanted to, but as there were not many women candidates, the party decided to give the ticket to Jaywantiben Mehta. They also did not want to look around for another candidate for the Mumbadevi seat in case I was contesting for the Lok Sabha.

Hasn't Murli Deora's campaign labelling the state government as anti-tenant got you on the backfoot considering there seems to be little or no response from your side?

Murli Deora has money power, he can issue an advertisement 50 times over.

But does anyone become a tenant leader merely on the strength of advertisements?

More than anyone else, the tenants know it is Raj Purohit and two successive Chief Ministers of the Sena-BJP government which have been taking up their cause right upto the Supreme Court. We have done more for the tenants in four years than the Congress has done in forty years.

What are the provisions of the new Rent Act which the government is planning to introduce?

This new act is one of the priorities of the new state government and will be passed in the first session of the state assembly. With this, the decades of harassment of tenants by landlords will cease. The landlord's no objection certificate will no longer be mandatory, hereditary rights to the tenants have been given, a certificate of which the landlord has to give within seven days or pay a penalty. If a landlord takes a rupee extra, he will be penalised, if he takes a tenant to court, he has to give a three-month notice period as against the earlier one month.

Over 95 per cent of the buildings in your constituency are old and in dire need of repairs. What have you done for them?

There are over 8,000 such buildings in my constituency. Over 840 of them are under repair. One of the last decisions the state government took was to sanction a new self-contained multi-storey transit camp in Cuffe Parade, tripling its present capacity of 400 families to 1200 families. This will greatly facilitate the repairs in my constituency and the tenants will not have to go far from the city.

Though you were minister of state for housing you did not take any active interest in the government's Slum Rehabilitation Scheme, the disastrous Shiv Shahi Punarvasan Prakalp (SSPPL)?

As I was busy with the repair board and old buildings, I told Dada (Housing Minister Sureshdada Jain) that I couldn't handle the additional workload of the SSPPL, though I was already vice-chairman of the company.