Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) officials on Tuesday sought plans of 30 buildings in the circles of Kukatpally, Serilingampally and Rajendranagar as part of their probe into illegal buildings ordered by the High Court last Monday.
The HC directed a report to be filed within a month on building permissions given in the last five years in the municipal corporation. Each year, the municipal corporation permits buildings up to two floors at the circle level, four floors at the zonal level and five floors and above as well as multiplexes and big commercial complexes at the head office.
Ten-member team
A 10-member town planning team has been formed to assist the ACB in the survey and sourcing of information from the respective head office and circle offices, official sources said. The HC enquiry would include permissions granted to Ayyappa Housing Cooperative Society and Gurukul Trust where demolitions of many unauthorised high-rises were taken up last month.
The HC has remarked that large-scale illegal constructions of multi-storied buildings cannot come up without the ‘collusion and complicity,' of GHMC officials.
Building plans pertaining to a particular circle or zone office are stored at the respective offices. It was only recently that the Commissioner, M.T. Krishna Babu, called for all building plans copies released from 2007 when GHMC was formed to be kept available at all offices for accessing information by the citizens.
Gathering information
The ACB officers have begun gathering information from senior municipal officials about the procedure adopted for giving building permissions at various levels, rules, building committees, deviations that occur, Building Regularisation Scheme (BRS) and the more recent Building Penalisation Scheme (BPS) and so on.
Apparently, the agency sleuths also wanted to know if cases against the buildings cleared for regularisation under either of the schemes can be reopened. The ACB's concentration is likely to be on building plans cleared for ground plus four floors and above.
Even among them, the expectation is that they will be scrutinising anywhere between 200 to 300 building plans picked up randomly to get a precise idea of the operations going on and point lacunae in the rules as well fix responsibility on the officials concerned.
