The Hindu : CMDA directed to suspend major works

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 05, 2002

Southern States

Southern States - Tamil Nadu-Chennai

CMDA directed to suspend major works

By Feroze Ahmed

CHENNAI JULY 4 . The Government has instructed the CMDA to ``informally suspend'' all major works and concentrate its staff in the processing of all regularisation files and applications by December, CMDA sources said.

In effect, it has ordered suspension on development works for the next six months, while it takes steps to condone violations.

Criticising the latest direction, some CMDA officials said it would restrict them from carrying out regular planning and development activities - ``In a sense, we will cease to be a development authority''.

It will also severely cripple the real estate industry as it places a suspension on processing of planning permits ``maybe for even six months'', they said.

``The CMDA officials informed us that they have been instructed to put a freeze on planning permission applications till at least July end. They are also refusing to admit applications for Green Channel,'' said a builder who had tried to submit his application. ``In the previous schemes, the process was only slowed but there is a complete suspension now,'' he said.

The city has already been affected by over three years of the regularisation scheme, as many of the CMDA staff were diverted for it. ``Of the 800-odd employees in the CMDA, about 700 were deployed for regularisation each time the scheme was announced,'' pointed out a CMDA engineer who said he and other technical staff were largely unemployed since the first scheme was announced in 1999.

``Instead of developing the city, the staff were diverted to sanction planning permission and regularise buildings. More than Rs.6 crores are collected annually as development charges but the money is hardly used for area development projects,'' he said, adding that the agency was not looking at the big picture anymore.

Another senior official pointed out that ``works taken up during the last four years were less significant compared with the World Bank schemes implemented before 1996.'' He however drew a list of projects carried out - or being planned - by the CMDA during the regularisation period.

Clearly, morale in the CMDA is at a low. Some officials are even against regularising buildings that are in blatant violation of building rules and affect their neighbourhoods. But any thinking on these lines would likely be taken up only after the extended deadline for the scheme ends July 8.

The biggest casualty of the scheme is the CMDA's second masterplan. According to sources, the Government has been delaying finalising the document as many norms in the two-decade-old first masterplan are likely to be relaxed in the second masterplan, which would affect the regularisation scheme. ``The CMDA is now operating on a dead document,'' said a Town Planning executive of the Chennai Corporation.

But urban development is never in any political agenda, officials said. ``Governments nowadays are not for long-term projects, having tasted the spoils of short-terms works,'' they added.

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