BENGALURU: The Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) has been ordered by the Supreme Court to earmark 150 acres of land in Dr Shivaram Karanth Layout to the Rajiv Gandhi Housing Corporation Limited for the sake of the Economically Weaker Sections (EWS), Judge A V Chandrashekar, Chairman of the SC appointed Justice A V Chandrashekar Committee (JCC), said on Tuesday. It is proposed to build at least 15,000 flats here each running to roughly 500 sq ft in dimension.
The three-member committee has been set up to identify lawful constructions in the proposed layout so that they could be regularised. Following the recommendations of the committee functioning since December 2020, the SC has regularised 1475 buildings that have come up in the 17 villages from 2014 to 2018 and soon plans to issue regularisation certificates to all the building owners.
Briefing mediapersons at the BDA head office, the former HC judge said that the SC on March 31 this year had called for the EWS allotments to be spread across six separate blocks in the layout with 25 acres allocated in each of them. "The SC has emphasised that the houses need to be spacious. The blocks must be well spread out, multi-storied and the apartments must be constructed under the EWS scheme," he said. The allotment of land will be made under the supervision of the JCC, the court had stated.
The court has also exempted 25 guntas of land from acquisition for formation of the layout in Avalahahalli belonging to BMS Educational Trust, a part of BMS Institute of Technology, he said. Another 34 guntas at Harohalli have been granted exemption from acquisition due to mismatch of boundaries.
Unique regularisation certificates
Asked if the committee would be able to complete ascertaining the status of all the 7,161 applications it has received seeking regularisation, committee member and former DGP S T Ramesh said the regularisation certificates to be issued for this specific layout was proving to be a complicated task and could take some time. "Each owner had to be issued a unique certificate. This is an unprecedented scenario for the BDA wherein owners have built constructions on their own lands and are coming forward to regularise them."
Asked if any betterment fee needs to be paid to the BDA by those whose houses have been regularised, former BDA Commissioner Jayakar Jerome said, "The infrastructure in an area gets a boost whenever the BDA develops it and the value of the property shoots up. Hence, there could be some amount collected by the BDA later on."