JOIN US'Unauthorised colonies due to bad planning'
Urban Development Minister Kamal Nath on Monday said regularisation of unauthorised colonies in the capital is an offshoot of bad planning, which could not check the proliferation of these colonies.
“It is bad planning rather than poor enforcement. How can you enforce 1,600 irregular colonies? Who is going to enforce it,” the minister said. He was speaking at a Delhi Development Authority (DDA) workshop here on Review of the Master Plan of Delhi 2021.
“Perhaps we are the only country in the world which had to bring in a legislation, the Delhi Special Laws, saying we are going to regularise it. It is a tribute to bad planning,” he added.
On September 6, Delhi Lieutenant Governor Tejendra Khanna had approved the regularisation of 895 unauthorised colonies after the Delhi government sent a list of 917 unauthorised colonies to be cleared by Khanna.
The Shiela Dikshit-led Congress government in Delhi had issued provisional regularisation certificates to over 1,600 illegal colonies in 2008 ahead of the assembly polls. However, it hung fire till 2012 when Dikshit took up the matter with the central government and got 917 unauthorised colonies regularised in September this year.
At the same workshop, Lieutenant Governor Tejendra Khanna — on the basis of a survey by Central Building Research Institute — said that 70 per cent of buildings on the Yamuna floodplains were structurally unsafe.
He informed the audience that the DDA has been asked to form a specific unit to deal with this problem.
Khanna, who is also the chairman of DDA, said the survey found that 70 per cent of houses on the Yamuna flood plains were “unsafe structurally” and could face damage in the event of a severe earthquake.
“I have been telling DDA that we want to create a specific body to go in for retrofitting and reconstruction of unsafe housing in east Delhi,” he said. He also said private developers could also utilise the opportunity to develop unauthorised colonies.
“I think redevelopment of all unauthorised colonies is going to be a huge opportunity for developers,” he said, adding developers could be given additional FAR for such redevelopment.
Khanna noted that farmhouses in Delhi functioned as “lungs of the city” and said it would be a disaster if high density buildings were to come up there as there would be no water to drink.
He said farmhouses would be regularised by charging a fee and they would be required to maintain a minimum prescribed level of greenery.