BENGALURU: The reason behind the chaotic presence of commercial units in residential areas is the inability of the town planners to visualise such exponential growth, say experts. They argue that authorities lacked vision and failed to produce a citizen-centric vision document and let all the residential areas be taken over by commercial units without any enforcement.
The Supreme Court issued a directive in March to all the corporations in the country to conduct a comprehensive inquiry to identify areas that are designated only for ‘residential use’ but were being misused for ‘non-residential purposes’. However, the five city corporations under the Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) are yet to take up the survey, let alone a large-scale crackdown on the violators.
Earlier this year, GBA Chief Commissioner M Maheshwar Rao said that trade licences issued after 2015 in residential areas, on roads less than 40 feet wide, will be withheld and rejected with endorsement in accordance with zonal regulations.
He added that on roads wider than 40 feet in residential areas, only specified and permitted trades will be renewed within prescribed limits; all others will be withheld and rejected with endorsement. However, residents alleged that the Commissioner’s order largely remains confined to paper and has seen hardly any implementation on the ground.
Urban Planner Chamapaka Rajagopal said commercialisation of residential areas has no easy fixes. “It is a classic conundrum of political economy of market dynamics versus regulations. Underlying the issue of over-commercialisation is the question of how much to regulate. Rigid, idealistic regulations are not the solution because they lead to opaque-third party opportunism, leading to pro-business regulatory exceptions.”
On the other hand, she warned that flexible regulations may exacerbate the issue. “A possible answer lies in negotiated decision-making between the authority and residents at the neighbourhood level for commercial uses that could potentially cause heightened negative externalities.
For this process to be institutionalised, ward-level elected representatives, supported by officials, must be empowered and capacitated to convene and negotiate decisions transparently. Such a deliberative decision-making process can be time-consuming and tedious. But that is the nature of local democracy, which reconciles competing demands”, Champaka said.
Citizen Activist Vidyadhar Durgekar lamented that we lack planning and apply it only when we fail. He said that rapid expansion is acceptable and that any correction, if any, can be carried out later. “Because of this, disasters like the Delhi fire are caused and ignored after a few days, with no one being accountable for the bad planning or bad implementation, mixing up of residential and commercial areas”, he said.
It is seen that such a mix cannot be avoided totally. There has to be some controlled mix of both in commercial as well as residential layouts, Durgekar said.
N S Mukunda, Founder Member of Bengaluru Praja Vedike, said that the city’s growth over the past 10 years has been highly unplanned and haphazard. He said this was because the city is following the concept of mixed-use zone development introduced by the Revised Master Plan (RMP) 2015.
He argued that the town planners failed to visualise such exponential growth in Bengaluru and blamed their inability to produce a citizen-centric vision document.
“Even now it is not too late. Let them (government) have a series of real citizen consultations and formulate a realistic vision document and restore planned growth. For this, the government also has to stop planning according to the whims and fancies of egoistic individuals of the ruling government but strictly follow the mandate of the 74th Constitutional Amendment”, he said.
Unfortunately, every major city seems to be following the same concept except for places like Chandigarh, Gandhinagar, Amravati and, to some extent, Navi Mumbai and Gurugram. In these cities, you have separate sectors for commercial buildings and the rest will be residential sectors. This ensures a calm, tranquil area for residences, Mukunda said.
Urban Planner Anjali Mohan said that the idea of mixed land use in cities is premised on a healthy mix of commercial, residential and other compatible uses.
“Mixed-use neighbourhoods are advantageous in that they reduce the reliance on automobiles for everyday requirements. Hence, small commercial establishments in residential areas are not a problem. These are desirable mixed land uses.
Therefore, commercialisation of residential areas is not the issue. It’s the nature of commercialisation that is the problem”, Anjali said. The urban planner said that the role of a responsible government agency is to regulate the mix of land use and that the issue can be fixed only if the concerned officials are directed strictly to enforce the zoning regulations.
Additional Director of Town Planning, Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA) BN Girish said that “Bengaluru has all the growth potential, and nobody expected that the growth would be beyond expectations. It’s the Information Technology and Biotechnology revolution and the feeling of safety by the public that led to such an expansion.”
He said the city needs a master plan every 10 years, and decentralisation and forming of townships beyond Bengaluru should all be part of the Master Plan. Girish said that there is no magic wand to address the issue overnight and it would take two years to draft a master plan.
Multiple factors must be considered for the master plan. We need to study the socio-economic survey, the city’s population study, and its development trends; everything should be taken into consideration. A city should have a concept”, he said.
He added that those who wish to set up industrial and commercial hubs outside the city must be incentivised. On the commercialisation encouraging owners to take up illegal constructions, by adding floors to earn more money, Girish said the implementation of laws was lagging to an extent.
He said that the unauthorised constructions with plan deviations for setting up commercial areas in residential areas would put more pressure on the existing infrastructure and also result in loss of taxes to the government.