Govt must help private builders

SURAT, June 10: WHILE welcoming the Union Cabinet's decision to repeal the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation ACT ULCRA, a main impediments...

SURAT, June 10: WHILE welcoming the Union Cabinet8217;s decision to repeal the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation ACT ULCRA, a main impediments in developing land for housing, city8217;s leading consulting engineer H T Shah has opined that just scraping the Act would not solve the acute housing problem in urban areas.

In an open letter to Urban Development Minister Ram Jethmalani, Shah urged the government to prepare a national policy for development of metropolitan cities and rationalise land development control rules.

Procedure for approval of developmental plans should be streamlined and a single-window system should be introduced for the clearance of the plan, he added.

Multiple authorities and multiple laws for sanctioning developmental plan have created more problems, than they have solved, he alleged.

Pointing out that the more than 11 million houses required to provide shelter to the urban poor could not built by the government alone, he suggested that the government should instead play the role of a facilitator, encouraging greater participation of private builders in the housing sector.Builders should be encouraged to utilise the funds from World Banks, he said adding that finance for housing schemes should be made easily available to the land developers.

The centre should also ask the state governments to workout some strategy so that the valuable land of urban area released from ULCRA be developed only for housing purpose, he suggested.

There are many other legal and procedural constraints in development of land in urban area which need to be addressed, he announced. Alleging that the Rent Control Legislation has led to malpractices and disputes between landlords and tenants, he said that the landlord should not feel insecure once he rents out his place. Similarly, tenants too should be protected from being exploited by the landlord, he added.

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Claiming that the functioning of urban development authorities in metropolitan cities had been deteriorating due to shortage of staff and finance, he said that such authorities had reserved thousands of hectares of urban land for different corporates and government bodies.

And since no action has been taken in acquiring the reserved land for a period of more than 15 years, such valuable area remained unused for many years and as a result construction activities in urban areas had come to a standstill, he claimed.

Referring to the ban on construction activities within 500 meters of the high tide mark of the sea, Shah said that while coastal areas and marine life should be protected from industrial pollution, construction of houses on coastal area should be permitted as it did not create any environmental hazards.

Process for converting agricultural land to non-agricultural ones in urban area and within municipal limits was complicated and time-consuming, he claimed. However, once the master plan for the development of the city was prepared and the agricultural land had been changed into non-agricultural ones, developers should not be forced to go to the Revenue Officer for getting the No Objection8217; permission, he commented.