The PMC has awarded the contract of preparing the development plans for the 38 merged villages to the IIIE. The project of completing the development plan, on since November last, is expected to be completed by November this year.

While briefing mediapersons about the progress of the project, Gaikwad said various measures were being considered to prevent growth of slums in the merged villages.

The measures include increasing the percentage of land reservation for housing schemes for EWS and providing additional FSI and concessions in the Development Control Rules for such schemes. The civic administration was also probing the possibility of providing gross subsidies to such schemes, he said.

According to Gaikwad, the civic administration intended to link the development plan for the merged villages with that prepared for the earlier municipal limits to work out integrated and simultaneous development of the entire city.

City Engineer Madhav Harihar said the work of evaluating the previous Development Plan has already been completed. Also over were the socio, economic, industrial and traffic surveys for overall appraisal of the merged areas; analysis of land suitability; population projection; formulation of planning norms and preparation of existing land use maps.

Harihar said that the work of formulating the DC rules for merged areas, economic projections and growth model and assessing future needs were still in progress.

He said the existing land use survey revealed that illegal constructions had cropped up in a densely populated area of 51 acres, which is about 20 per cent of the entire projected area. Buildings have been constructed illegally on the hill tops and hill slopes in some of the areas, he added, which is a no development green zone in the erstwhile municipal limits.

The civic administration will be concentrating on providing the basic amenities in this area. The PMC has already served notices on the owners of some of the illegal constructions, Harihar said. Harihar said advance techniques like global positioning system, total station survey and satellite imagery were used for preparing the existing land use in the development plan.

The physical survey in 36 villages was carried out by using the sophisticated Total Station instrument which has electronic distance measurement utility, he said. Satellite imagery to the scale of 1:12,500 for the projected area was obtained from the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) to delineate the urban sprawl in the villages, he added. The Geographic Information System was being used to handle inter-relationship of city urbanisation, its development, urban infrastructure and natural resources along with the management infrastructure like water supply, drainage and road networks.