Strict compliance to a monthly reporting system for ensuring the accountability of officials, mainly secretaries and engineers in local bodies, has been mooted to end the alleged arbitrariness and delay in granting building permits and other clearances.
Local Administration Department sources told The Hindu that the government had issued a circular earlier, directing secretaries of both urban and rural local bodies to report the details of applications received every month for building permits, occupation certificates, regularisation of plans and such others to the councils and committees of elected members. But this is more honoured in the breach.
Elected representatives of local bodies do not reserve the authority to direct the engineering wing or secretary to grant or deny such permissions, but they would have a clear grasp of the number of applications received every month and also hold the officials concerned, mainly the secretary, accountable for delay or arbitrariness.
Revisiting or diluting the provisions of the building rules separately framed for urban and rural local bodies is no panacea for the concerns of the applicants about the delay in clearance since it will set the ground for even more grave violations and unbridled construction.
The rules have been framed in such a way as to insulate them from political intervention and to facilitate granting of permits strictly on merit. Tinkering with the process would prove deleterious for the State.
The reporting system would deny scope for mudslinging between the political leadership and the bureaucracy in the event of a row like the one over the death of an NRI investor at Anthoor in Kannur.
Moreover, awareness should be created of the building rules among architects and engineers so that they would prepare plans without violations.
