JOIN USHouses with red marks attract attention on Bannerghatta Road and Kanakapura Road, which are up for acquisition for road widening.
These are not the only roads where buildings bear red marks. In all, BBMP has identified thousands of houses on 216 roads in the City. They are sort of untouchable in the real estate market, as they may be demolished some day. There is an uncertainty surrounding these buildings. Not just the owners of the buildings. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike also does not know when the buildings will be acquired and what will the fate of the road widening project be.
Yet, the Palike issued the Transferable Development Rights (TDR) to the building owners, a hard bargain by the financially ailing BBMP to acquire land without paying a penny to the property losers. The owners are free to sell their TDR to anyone who wants to construct an extra floor within the Floor Area Ratio of the area. In this state of dilemma, the real beneficiaries are the builders who have bought the TDR and expanded their projects.
Rajashekar of Save Bangalore Committee says that if these projects are implemented, it will lead to the biggest displacement in the history of Bengaluru for ‘development’.
“Nearly three lakh people will be displaced if these roads are widened,” says Rajashekar. The project has been put on hold, but the TDR trade is in full swing, benefiting the BBMP officials, building owners and the builders.
What is very apparent is the flaw in the land acquisition process. In most of the cases, the land is ‘acquired’ just to keep the land acquisition process in motion.
Take the case of Kalyan Nagar in HRBR Layout and a portion of Banashankari 6th Stage on Survey No 8 of Gubbalala village, where BDA had formed a layout only to realise decades later that the land were actually tank bed and as per rules, no construction activity should take place there.
When the Revenue department woke up to reclaim the lake land, the BDA came out with a lame excuse that there are many infrastructure projects on the lake land.
People who have spent all their savings on these houses do not know where to go after being deceived not by any individual but the government itself.
To sum up their plight, D S Rajashekar, president of the Citizens' Action Forum, says, “Our anguish is that we have been cheated by the government. We are let down by the government itself for no fault of us. We want to know what the various departments were doing when the layout was formed.”