A public interest litigation petition has been filed in the Madras High Court challenging the legal validity of two government orders issued on October 26 and November 1 virtually modifying the second master plan for Chennai metropolitan area and thereby making significant changes to Floor Space Index (FSI), the ratio between built up area to the area of the plot on which a building is constructed.
First Division Bench of Chief Justice Vijaya Kamalesh Tahilramani and Justice M. Duraiswamy has sought for the government’s response by Thursday to the PIL petition filed by K.P. Subramanian, a retired professor of urban engineering at Anna University here. In his affidavit, the petitioner said, the second master plan for Chennai metropolitan area was approved by the State government way back on September 2, 2008. Though more than 10 years had passed since then, it was not reviewed at all as mandated under Section 32(2) of the Tamil Nadu Town and Country Planning Act of 1971.
The Development Regulations, which were part of the master plan, provide a set of planning parameters including FSI depending upon the type of buildings. The regulations fix the FSI for ordinary buildings with ground plus one floor at 1.5 ratio.
Similarly, the FSI was fixed at 1.5 for special building (more than two floors/six dwelling units) and 1.5 for Group Developments (two or more blocks on a site). In so far as multi storeyed buildings exceeding four floors or 15.25 m in height were concerned, the FSI was fixed at different ratios despending upon the width of the road. These indexes were fixed taking into consideration the density of population in the city.
However, without carrying elaborate studies to review the second master plan, the government had through executive orders attempted to increase the FSI for different types of buildings arbitrarily, the petitioner said and urged the court to quash the two GOs. He pointed out that the FSI for ordinary residential buildings had been raised from 1.5 to 2.0 and for multi storeyed buildings it had been raised up to 3.5.
“I submit that the FSI provided in a master plan bears a direct correlation to the capacity of basic amenities in place specifically in terms of roads, water supply and sewer network and storm water drain. Any increase in permissible FSI without a corresponding augmentation of those basic amenities would result in a litany of issues including awful traffic congestion, pollution, accidents, acute water scarcity, overflowing of sewers, putrefying of solid waste and flooding,” the petitioner said.
