Stop land sharks, stop illegal constructions

TIMES CITY CAMPAIGN: ENSURE COMPLIANCE OF LAND USE RULES
Stop land sharks, stop illegal constructions
Times of India

Bangalore: Ecologists have one major grouse against Garden City — that birds have stopped coming here, that aquatic life is getting increasingly abysmal. They say land sharks set up highrise structures throwing regulations to the winds.

On Monday this week, BCC demolished walls that had been put up near Sankey lake by a reputed builder. This particular project has invoked the ire of forest department officials, BCC authorities, NGOs, green groups and neighbourhood associations of Malleswaram, Sadashivanagar. If the project came up, they said, it would endanger the ecology of the lake and rainwater would flood low-lying areas even further. The Sankey lake itself, being a freshwater lake, would further get depleted in the process, they said.

Officials at the Lake Development Authority recount how during restoration work, many constructions had come up on the periphery of lakes without permission. Said an official: “At Kali Agrahara lake, there were constructions which were not encroachments but were blatant violations. You cannot have a building on the periphery of the lake without our permission and of course nobody had sought our permission.’’ The official also recounts an instance at Puttenahalli, JP Nagar, where two huge buildings have come up, without permission, and have even been occupied recently. Ditto for structures near Hebbal lake.

Lake Development Authority CEO A.K. Varma explains: “The sewage generated from buildings is likely to be let into lakes in an untreated manner. In practice, we found that the catchment area gets blocked, rainwater which would have otherwise flowed into the lake, flows elsewhere leading to flooding in low-lying areas. Consequently, the aquatic and birdlife also gets affected.”

To check this menace, the then BCC Commissioner M.R. Sreenivasa Murthy had set up special engineering panels comprising senior officers. The committee is to look into applications and send them to the Commissioner for approval. The committee was also empowered to scrutinise applications for building commencement certificates and occupational certificates. “The panel meets regularly to check any increase in illegal constructions,’’ defends a senior BCC official. And then adds that many of them on the outskirts of the city are ones that have been allotted by BDA.

An oft-repeated explanation from officials is that land in low-lying areas is cheap, construction is cheaper and thus the economically weaker sections get lured, unaware of they being ‘illegal constructions’.

WE THE PEOPLE
AAM JANATA

Prasad Reddy,
resident of Banashankari II stage Illegal constructions in the city have to be dealt with in a ruthless manner. Bangalore City Corporation officials need to pull up their socks and get on with inspection work. Those buildings that have already come up and have bypassed the BCC laws should just be demolished.

CELEBRITY
Justice M.F. Saldanha: Illegal constructions are a socio-economic and legal problem. According to a recent survey done by some students, at present, there are 15,000 constructions on the city’s landscape and each of them have violated some or the other BCC by-law, the most common being not adhering to the setback area. We have to take corrective measures at the initial stage itself for once the building comes up, there come up other arguments.