City residents will soon be allowed to build houses on plots of land that span less than 860 sq ft.
The Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) has permitted the Chennai Corporation to relax its planning parameters, pertaining to plot extents for ordinary residential development in ‘detached areas’ under the Corporation limits.
However the relaxation of norms will be restricted to cases where there are “demonstrable hardships, family partition, court cases etc… in cases of genuine hardships.”
A few months ago, the civic body asked CMDA to reduce the minimum area required for construction of a residential house in a detached building area from the present 80 square metres (860 square feet) to 50 square metres (538 square feet).
Civic body officials said that many families were facing challenges, when they had to partition their house among children, because of the existing planning parameters. They said such a relaxation would make housing more affordable as land prices in congested parts of the city were not affordable for many.
The CMDA restriction has also been preventing residents from getting bank loans to build houses. Also, many violations have been reported in residential localities due to the current restriction.
“If any resident has less than 80 square metre of land, they have to show why they require a relaxation of norms to construct a house on that plot. A committee will be constituted to make a decision in such cases,” said Corporation commissioner D. Karthikeyan.
The decision to relax planning parameters was taken based on the demands of a few elected representatives of the Corporation Council.
