The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority and other urban development authorities are confident of meeting the September 27 deadline in disposing of the applications pending with them under the Layout Regularisation Scheme (LRS).
This should come as a relief to the applicants who had been waiting for almost two years but then there are also doubts whether the State machinery can dispose of over 65,000 pending applications in a matter of a week to 10 days with limited staff in HMDA, the Directorate of Town and Country Planning and municipal corporations.
The HMDA Commissioner Chiranjeevulu said they were fully geared up to complete the processing of the applications and dispose them of within the deadline including field verification. The applicants would be given a month’s time to pay the specified amount for regularisation.
The officials had a meeting on Tuesday to review the progress of the LRS. The Telangana Government issued GO 151 in November 2015 for the regularisation of unauthorised layouts in accordance with the guidelines. It was made mandatory for all plot owners, as a last chance, to apply for the regularisation scheme to facilitate planned development of urban areas in the State and for development of layouts in tandem with the HMDA Master Plan and other municipal corporation and urban development authorities of Warangal, Khammam, Karimnagar, Nizamabad and Mahbubnagar.
Of 1,74,938 applications submitted to the HMDA for regularisation of plots in the unauthorised layouts, only 66,000 applications had been processed in the last 20 months. Through application fee alone, the HMDA collected ₹165 crore.
The HMDA had rejected 9,430 applications as the applicants did not pay the processing fee of ₹10,000. In the remaining 65,000 pending applications, 40,000 applications were identified for shortfall of documents and the plot owners would have to upload them or hand them over at the HMDA facilitation centre in case of difficulty. The remaining 25,000 applications would have to be processed and of them 15,000 applications had issues related to Master Plan.
Many of the survey numbers with unauthorised layouts in the HMDA limits were not to be found in the Master Plan and that was one of the main reasons for 14,000 applications being kept in abeyance. However sources said that there were some discrepancies in the Master Plan which did not record many survey numbers, ponds, tanks, roads in the villages. Some villages altogether went missing from the Master Plan.
The department recently deputed special teams to identify the coordinates of over 700 layouts and they would be aligned to the Master Plan. Then clarity would emerge whether the layout was in the tank bed or in the government land.
