Express Focus -- GUJRAT -- by Indian Express

IT’S a typical story of urban growth gone badly wrong. Gujarat’s six major cities — Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat, Rajkot, Bhavangar and Jamangar — are home to around 37,000 illegal constructions. Like in most Indian cities, the constructions here have mushroomed right under the noses of municipal officers and town planners. Now, a new ordinance passed by the Gujarat government has, in one pen stroke, legalised all these blatant violations, commercial or residential, of building laws. With it, errant builders, architects, town planners and municipal inspectors who allowed the laws to be violated will get away scot-free.

This regularisation has a price: an ‘impact fee’ to be charged on the unauthorised constructions. The government will also levy a penalty on floors and penthouses constructed illegally in high-rise buildings.

Town development officers feel that by charging an ‘impact fee,’ every rule that has been broken is being covered up. ‘‘By this ordinance and the rules that are being framed, the government is allowing the illegal to become legal,’’ remarked one officer.

Sources in city planning units of municipal corporations agree that the practice of preparing ‘progress reports’ of buildings under construction has been set aside, resulting in large-scale unauthorised constructions.

According to sources in municipal corporations in Ahmedabad and Rajkot, supervisor engineers of civic bodies who are supposed to visit the sites after the town planning department approves the plans of a builder have not been filing progress reports since several years.

P.S. Patel, town development officer in Ahmedabad, observed, ‘‘Almost all unauthorised buildings across Gujarat have never applied for title clearance. And since there was no supervision, the constructions went on unabated. Many illegal housing societies have come up across the state since nobody bothered to check when they were being constructed.’’

In the past, this issue has engaged the Gujarat High Court, which had rapped both the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority (AUDA) for not only allowing the unauthorised constructions, but also for not acting contrary to court directions to demolish them.

Municipal Commissioner K. Kailashnathan was hauled up several times by the court for not demolishing about 21 unauthorised structures in the city despite orders. Kailashnathan had a simple explanation for the delay: the civic bodies were waiting for regularisation of the constructions because action against such a large number of buildings was not possible!

Ahmedabad’s Mayor, Himmatsinh Patel, had another interesting reason: ‘human interest’. ‘‘Those who bought these shops and offices will suffer, not the builders who sold them. We don’t want this to happen.’’

The court had also rapped AMC officers working in the town development department. ‘‘The officers of the corporations who are working in this department are supposed to visit the sites and they are not required to sit idly in their office...When the Corporation is paying salaries to the employees, then it is the duty of such employees to give information to the higher officers. The Corporation, therefore, is supposed to take action against such erring officers or inspectors,’’ the court observed.

There are many precedents to the recent ordinance passed by the state government regularising unauthorised constructions. Between 1992-94, bureaucrats had issued orders to regularise unauthorised constructions. P.K. Ghosh, a senior IAS officer who was the AMC’s administrator in 1994-95, passed a resolution in November 1994 which permitted conversion of a building in a residential zone to commercial use by paying a licence fee of Rs 180 per square metre for FSI below 1 and Rs 270 sq metre for FSI above 1.

This resolution ran counter to a petition filed by the Consumer Protection Council in 1992, which had challenged an AMC resolution which permitted conversion for two years by paying Rs 600 per sq metre.

The court granted a stay on the conversion, but Ghosh went ahead with his plans.
Thus, the state government’s ordinance came as a saviour to these bureaucrats, apart from the builders. But those who will actually bear the brunt are people who bought the houses or shops without realising that they were illegal. Now, they will have to fork out the ‘impact’ fee which will ultimately feed the state government’s coffers.

Obviously, the builders’ lobby cannot hide its glee. ‘‘They are the biggest beneficiaries because instead of holding them responsible, the government is actually bailing them out with the impact fee,’’ says former municipal commissioner G.M. Khalsa. ‘‘They have made money from the illegal constructions. But they are not at all responsible any more.’’