With civic officials giving a commitment in the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to withdraw the March 30, 2017 circular stating that the NGT order was prospective and not retrospective, the city's real estate market is once again in confusion.
Mahendra Jain, Additional Chief Secretary, Urban Development Department (UDD), said that they will wait for a copy of the NGT order and a clarification from the bench on whether the May 4, 2016 order on buffer zone was prospective or retrospective. Till then, civic officials said that the market will be in disarray; no new plan will be sanctioned.
The nuanced contention of what is prospective and what is retrospective pertains not only to large projects but any development coming up in layouts approved before the May 4, 2016 judgment. In these layouts too, the bigger problem is not the lake buffer, but buffer zone around drains. The NGT order stipulates 50 metres from the edge of a primary drain, 35m from a secondary drain and 25m from a tertiary drain.
Most of the town planning schemes developed or approved by BDA have sites right next to tertiary drains, putting them in jeopardy. The bone of contention was whether prospective effect means no building should now come up in layouts approved before the judgment or whether these layouts should be exempt from the order. This confusion and appeals by BDA prompted the March 30 circular that will now be withdrawn.
Suresh Hari, secretary, CREDAI, Bengaluru, which has also challenged the NGT buffer zone order before the Supreme Court, said that they will again seek legal recourse in the apex court. “It is unfair that the buffer zone norms are being changed only for Bengaluru; other metro cities have buffers lesser than 30m. The withdrawal of the circular will put several genuine projects approved before the May 4, 2016 NGT order in jeopardy for no fault of theirs,” he said.
However, Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrashekhar, whose Namma Bengaluru Foundation has been at the forefront of the fight at the NGT, said that the March 30 circular showed that the BBMP and UDD ‘continue to be a front for builders and not the interest of the city and voices of the people’. He added that officials must be held accountable.
