Now, no public say in deciding city’s heritage

It will permit the civic body and the state government to sanction deletion or addition of structures from the heritage list without inviting public suggestions and objections.

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Incidentally, a previous draft of the revised DP, which was subsequently scrapped, had marked the heritage structures on the city map. Town planning norms make public suggestions and objections mandatory for changing the designated purpose of a land marked in the DP.

The latest draft has, however, just appended a draft list of heritage monuments, structures, and precincts, as recommended by the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee (MHCC) in 2012, to the DP, without marking these on the map. The new draft has already invited the wrath of heritage conservationists for snipping powers of the heritage panel.

When asked, a senior civic official said, “Instances of heritage structures being incorrectly marked in the previous draft had invited a lot of flak. The entire process of inviting suggestions and objections and getting approvals from statutory civic committees, the general body and then the state government had to be carried out even for rectifying errors on the development plan. So, we decided to leave heritage structures out of the development plan maps.”

The appended list contains a total of 948 heritage monuments, structures and precincts. But this list is yet to be approved and notified by the government.

The civic body has also followed a similar approach for roads proposed to be widened and for religious structures. The previous draft had been criticised for errors in marking of the road line and for errors in land use at religious sites. “Details of the roads to be taken up for widening and their proposed widened road line have just been appended to the development plan. Religious places, shrines have not been marked on the development plan unless they are reserved specifically for the purpose,” an official said.