BMC drops local area plans

The LAP includes open spaces, gardens, playgrounds, recreational areas and streetscape design and is important for the city’s area-wise development.

Even though the last draft had noted that the master plan and zonal plans in practice in Delhi were successful, and also that strategic use of local plans in the form of Town Planning Schemes in Ahmedabad were successful, the latest draft of the Development Plan 2014-34 has not included these.

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The BMC has justified dropping them by claiming that the exercise of drawing them up would be a time-consuming, and it would have to ‘follow the same arduous and prolonged process as the city-level DP’ for it.

The draft DP states that the civic body does not have the administrative structure to handle the preparation of more than 200 LAPs, adding that such second-tier plans were not taken up in the earlier DPs of 1964 or 1991.

Urban planners like Pankaj Joshi, executive officer of the Urban Design Research Institute, stated that LAPs were one of the good things in the last DP, which have now been left out.

“The city’s development plan needs a LAP since an individual ward can include around 1 million people. The 74th amendment of the Act allows the planning authority to devolve powers to local authorities. However, the revised DP has, illogically, completely dropped the provision,” he said.

Officials in the DP department argued that they have compensated for the LAPs by preparing detailed ward-level reports that have been included in the draft DP, and that the process of creating LAPs can be initiated if needed.