Chennai Corporation will begin issuing permission online for road cuts in all the city’s 15 zones from Monday. Residents and service providers will be able to submit applications for road cuts online to the civic body, following which the system will generate a registration number to track the status of their application. This online system is likely to reduce delays in the sanctioning of road cuts.
The charges to be paid to the Corporation for road cuts will also be available online for each of the applications. Residents will also be given access to the complete list of permitted road cuts with details pertaining to the period within which the work has to be completed.
Applications for road cuts are being received from at least 15,000 residents who build houses in the city every year. Thousands of road cut applications are also received by the Corporation from service providers such as telecom and metrowater. The decision to permit road cuts is normally taken in two weeks.
The online mode of granting permission is likely to address the challenges faced by several residents in obtaining service connections. The information on online applications and their status will help the Corporation reduce processing time and intervene if it is necessary to do so.
Service agencies such as Metrowater receive more than 2,000 applications in a month seeking water and sewer connections. Residents who submit applications to such service providers have to provide documents, including copies of property assessment, building plans and a document certifying no tax arrears. The applications registered with agencies such as Metrowater are sent to area offices and connections are provided within a month. But the process depends on the site inspection and the time taken to obtain permission for road cuts from the civic body.
Connections to buildings on bus route roads take two or three months, as it is difficult to get permission to cut the roads.
The civic body has also developed an application to track the status of violations of new constructions.
