Greater B’lore bylaw enforcement tough

Greater B’lore bylaw enforcement tough
New Indian Express

BANGALORE: The proposed Greater Bangalore would place about 11 lakh buildings under town planning department and with about 20 per cent increase per year the task of enforcing building bylaw would become impossibly difficult. The Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP) never enforced its rules on building violations and as the buildings increase, it would only offer greater opportunity for corrupt engineers.

Infact, the enforcement of building bylaw is daunting task for any City Corporation. Even Delhi had to be woken up to the situation by Supreme Court order.

Land starved Mumbai had a similar experience but the Mumbai High Court ordered that the civic body should give a legal notice to owners before taking action. The notice period is normally used to stay demolition orders of Corporation.

In case of Bangalore, the land use violations are rampant. Every ward has residences put to commercial use and BMP can cancel the license plan of such buildings but there was no action.

Following a PIL some action was seen in Koramangala but the residents were up in arms against BMP. Another PIL led to sealing of residential premises put to commercial use in Sadashivnagar but that too met with resistance.

Interestingly, there was no action at all against huge buildings with technical violations. Technical violations comprise violations of set back norms and floor area ratio. Almost every commercial building has its terrace used for some business which in violation of sanctioned FAR and all the basements are used as shops and not for parking as is mandatory.

BMP always talked about violations due to need and those due to greed. BMP officials said many times that single dwelling homes violating offset norms and building with little more FAR should be tolerated while the commercial complexes and apartments violating norms to make some more money must be punished. But no building owner was punished probably because the greed of BMP engineers was the cause.

BMP also made lot of noise about regularising the violations in city and relieving the building owners of the guilt and blackmail. But the civic body fell silent after the governor T N Chaturvedi returned the bill saying that such regularisation seeks to condone an offense.

Such being the chaos in BMP town planning department, Greater Bangalore is in for greater trouble.