The city Corporation has collected ₹1.2 crore as fee for regularisation of unauthorised constructions in the previous financial year.
This is the amount collected for regularisation at the local body level by which the Secretary can regularise a construction with minor violations by levying the fine amount.
In the previous financial year, the city Corporation received a total of 428 applications for regularisation of illegal constructions.
After weeding out the ones that were not possible to be cleared as per existing rules, 261 requests were forwarded to the State government, from which 245 have been approved and 16 were rejected.
“Most of the regularisation applications that were cleared at the Corporation level were of minor violations. In some cases, when the final construction would have lesser parking space than indicated in the plan, but if they have extra space to make up for this, it will regularised once the changes are made. In some other cases, the required setback space would not be there once the construction is finished, but there have been instances where the owners have purchased the adjacent land later, thus clearing the setback violation. Cases like this also will be regularised.” said a Corporation officials.
The owners of the building assessed as unauthorised need to pay three times that of the normal building tax amount.
The building also cannot be used for any commercial purposes, until it is regularised.
The Local Self Government department had in February last year issued the Kerala Municipality Building (Regularisation of Unauthorised Construction) Rules, 2018 as per which unauthorised buildings constructed before July 31, 2017, can be regularised after levying a fee.
The window for regularisation was set to expire on May 15. This has been thrice extended now, with the latest expiry date set for September 30 this year.
Compounding fee
The government had last year reduced steeply the compounding fee for unauthorised constructions in municipal areas.
The fee has now been done away with for residential buildings up to 60 square meters.
For the rest of the residential buildings up to 300 square meters, this has been put into three slabs of ₹3,000, ₹20,000 and ₹30,000 each.
But for other buildings (including commercial) up to 100 square meters, the rates which were 20 times of the permit fee has been reduced to 10 times the permit fee now.
