The Chennai Corporation is planning to shelve the project for drone survey of buildings in 29 wards around the airport owing to security reasons.
Drone images of buildings in 29 wards in areas such as Alandur, Adyar, Teynampet, Valasaravakkam and Perungudi have not been generated because of the delay in issuance of permission from the airport.
After several days of brainstorming, the civic body officials have decided to approach ISRO for completing the project. “We have written to the National Remote Sensing Centre, ISRO, for satellite imagery of the area covering 5 km radius of the Airport. But the satellite images will not have the same resolution. It will not be as clear as the images captured by a drone. This is a challenge,” said an official.
Airport authorities have not been able to give clearance for the project because of the high risk associated with flying drones close to the airport funnel area.
Forest officials have not cleared the proposal to generate drone images of the Guindy National Park and the Pallikaranai marshland. These images could uncover encroachments in these areas. Raj Bhavan officials have not permitted drone images of the premises, citing security reasons.
Currently, the civic body has generated drone images for 319 km of the city.
“The entire Alandur zone will not be able to get drone images for its buildings and utilities,” an official said. Identification of unassessed and underassessed buildings in the zone is likely to be delayed. In other zones of the city, work on identification of underassessed and unassessed buildings will begin this week. Compilation of data on a few wards is likely to be completed this week. Chennai Corporation will revise the property tax of such buildings after verifying the data, comparing the digitised drone images with the data compiled by tax assessors of the Chennai Corporation Revenue Department. Currently, the city has 12 lakh properties.
But the drone images are expected to facilitate the addition of several lakhs of properties in the property tax net. The civic body will also develop an App to check how footpaths have been used by pedestrians.
“We will link LIDAR data on footpaths with the digitised images. Civic officials will monitor how the situation has improved for pedestrians and suggest changes to improve conditions of footpaths,” said an official. The civic body will calculate the total number of floors, creating a unique id for every building in the city.
“Earlier, we did not have data for every building. This data will be used to spot violators. But we will not penalise the people below the poverty line,” an official said.
