Delhi Urban Development Minister A. K. Walia on Thursday said the Delhi Government has accelerated the process of regularisation of 1,639 unauthorised colonies that were given provisional regularisation certificates in 2008.
Dr. Walia, who chaired a high-level meeting on the issue, said the Urban Development Department intends to take up the case of more than 1,000 unauthorised colonies for formal regularisation in October this year. The Delhi Government has been working hard to complete all formalities in this regard to ensure formal regularisation of such colonies. He said the Government would also be presenting its case before the Delhi High Court to seek grant of its permission for the regularisation.
The meeting was attended among others by Director General of Survey of India Girish Kumar, Principal Secretary (UD) Selvraj and Secretary (Environment) Dharmendra.
Addressing these officials, Dr. Walia said it was important to formally regularise these colonies to ensure that they get all the civic amenities at the earliest. Such a move, he said, would also provide the much-needed relief to lakhs of people living in them since they had been deprived of the benefits of planned development thus far.
The Minister lauded the role of Survey of India in providing information and guidance to the Government on laying service lines for various civic amenities in such a way that no or minimal damage was caused to existing structures.
It was informed that 770 colonies have already been cleared from all angles for regularisation and now the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is working on the preparation of their final layout plans. The civic body has also been told to prepare the final layout plans in respect of 309 colonies which have been cleared by the Survey of India.
The Survey of India is at present examining the case of 277 unauthorised colonies for approval. It found that 42 of these colonies had come up on forest land while 44 had come up partially on forest land. Only 191 colonies out of these were not on forest land.
The Survey of India has also cleared all 118 colonies that came up on Delhi Development Authority land for regularisation.
At the meeting, the Forest Department was also instructed to examine the cases in respect of 86 such colonies and submit its final report in the first week of July.
Of the 1,639 colonies, the geo-referencing in respect of 1,345 colonies has been completed and 1,115 colonies have also been digitised. This will help the MCD prepare the final layout plans in respect of all unauthorised colonies and assist in finalisation of a proper comprehensive case for formal regularisation of the unauthorised colonies.
