State government to review pending BPS applications

The government seems to be looking afresh into clearing pending applications not cleared for various reasons under the Building Penalisation Scheme (BPS). GHMC with 27,860 applications, HMDA with about 10,000 applications, few thousand more in urban areas in rest of the State, can be cleared provided balance penal amounts are paid.

Deadline over

These should be differentiated from 40,446 other pending applications that have been classified to be “ineligible” for getting cleared because of various violations like constructions on prohibited spaces including Government lands, etc. But, the problem is that the last deadline for paying pending penal amounts was over by December end, 2010.

Ever since the government was getting requests from the municipal bodies to permit them to clear the eligible applications but it was unable to do so.

A major reason is a series of fake BPS certificates unearthed in quite a few municipal circles in the capital like Kukatpally and L.B. Nagar where clearances were taken for non-existent buildings and constructions were done later on.

The issue was serious enough for senior officials to suspend local town planning staff too. Now, the government is going about the issue with some trepidation, revealed senior officials. Discussions were going on at the highest level on modalities of clearing the pending stock of applications.

In the twin cities, more than 2.50 lakh applications were received for BPS and of them little more than 1.63 lakh were found to be eligible while more than 1.37 lakh forms were found to be in full shape.

Till the last deadline more than a year ago, 1.36 lakh applications were cleared.

If the initial penal amount collected was Rs.298.58 crore, thanks to the extension given later, the balance amount collected was much more at Rs.378.71 crore. Senior officials point out that substantial revenue would be realised by local bodies if the effective steps are taken to clear the pending applications.

Malkajgiri with 4,638 applications and L.B.Nagar/ Gadiannaram circles with 4,609 pending forms top the list. These are followed by Serilingampally with 2,645; head office 2,525; Khairatabad & environs 2,250 and Kapra 2,012.

As for ineligible applications, options before the civic bodies is to hike the property tax by 100 per cent or more if it is not going for demolitions, senior officials say. There are 11,834 pending applications of Layout Regularisation Scheme (LRS) too in GHMC.