Real estate is Pune’s growth engine with a dark underbelly

: They used to say of Pune that the English-speaking urban class prefer to stay in the Camp area while the Marathi-speaking people stay in the city. That is no longer a reality—the city is growing in all directions with no demographic biases. In the first 10 months of 2007, Pune city saw 1.65 lakh property registrations against 1.97 lakh registrations in 2006 and 1.60 lakh registrations in 2005. The officials are convinced that it will cross the 2-lakh mark this year.

The record number of land deals, however, has not come without a cost. Land grabbing is a malaise has spread its tentacles across the entire district—whether it be Chakan where the international airport is to come up, Maval and Talegaon, the hillside terrain adjoining Lonavla where the rich and the famous have made a beeline or within the city limits. While there are the Development Plan and Development Control rules in place, suggesting that development is planned and under control, the facts are different. There is, in fact, a palpable fear that a huge land scam is waiting to be exposed.

“I am shocked by the number and size of buildings coming up in the name of TDR (Transfer of Development Rights). But even a rickshaw driver can understand that such constructions will just put more load on the city's water, drainage. There is no one comprehensive plan for development,” says actor and former director of FTII, Mohan Agashe, who, in his column in this newspaper last year, called Pune “a schizophrenic city”.

Within the city are proven cases of constructions along the no-build-zone on the banks of Ramnadi—Pune’s parallel to Mumbai’s Mithi river—but no action is being taken against these illegal structures.

For the city, there’s no likelihood of waking up from this nightmare as the real estate sector is on fire and there are no signs of it cooling down despite one scam after another breaking out.

... contd.