The Town Planning Department is now giving the finishing touches to the much-delayed draft master plan of the city Corporation. The draft plan is expected to be submitted to the civic body within a month, but with the local body elections scheduled to happen later this year, further discussions on the draft are set to be delayed further.
“The document is being finalised. We expect to submit it to the Corporation at the earliest, probably in September itself. There was a delay of four to five months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to this, not all of the meetings planned before the preparation of the plan could happen. But, it will be entirely different from the previous draft master plan and will certainly not have issues for the public related to zoning regulations,” said an official of the Town Planning Department.
Earlier plan withdrawn
The Thiruvananthapuram draft master plan 2031, the previous version of the plan, was withdrawn in February 2014 following widespread public protests in the outer areas of the city, especially in Kattayikonam and Attipra, after people found their requests for building permits getting rejected as some of these areas were marked as strategic zones in the master plan.
After its withdrawal, land use has been mainly governed by the interim development order, based on which building permit applications were either granted or rejected. The work on a revised draft master plan began early in 2017 with an initial deadline at the end of that year. However, the deadline was revised many times owing to technical and other issues.
Surveys done
Learning a lesson from the backlash received for the previous master plan, the city Corporation and the Town Planning Department have been cautious this time around, ensuring that the public is taken along at every phase of the preparation. The whole process began with a people’s aspiration survey. Socio-economic survey was conducted at 25,000 selected houses. The civic body also had a long wait of one-and-a-half years for the satellite images of the city from the National Remote Sensing Centre.
To finalise the draft master plan, further discussions have to happen in the Corporation council, which can possibly be delayed due to the local body elections.
