NEW DELHI: Amid the ongoing spat between the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the Centre’s decision to accord ownership rights to residents of unauthorised colonies, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) on Tuesday introduced some changes to its website. The portal is aimed at helping the residents apply for registration of their properties.
The portal, under the head ‘Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)’, had stated that no regularisation exercise of unauthorised colonies is to be carried out. The AAP had trained guns at the Centre asking, how was it planning to grant ownership rights to residents if the colonies weren’t to be regularised.In the wake of the furore, the portal has removed the contentious bit and has, instead, detailed what the Centre plans to do under the PM-UDAY scheme — sale and purchase of houses without hindrance, making it easy to avail loans from banks against those properties and make changes to the building plan after approval from authorities concerned.
Earlier, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had accused the BJP of peddling ‘lies’ on the issue of unauthorised colonies to mine votes in the Assembly elections. On Monday, his deputy Manish Sisodia, too, questioned the Centre’s claims on these colonies.
Hitting back at Sisodia, Union Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Puri on Tuesday said, “It seems the deputy CM doesn’t have a clear grasp of things due to his lack of experience and is making a hue and cry over some words in the portal. Now, we have simplified the content on the portal for them to understand what we’re trying to accomplish.”
However, Sisodia hit back, saying, “Earlier, in the FAQ section of the portal, it was clearly written that the Bill tabled in the Parliament wasn’t meant to regularise the unauthorised colonies. The ’20-sentence’ explainer that has introduced is not much different in substance from what was written earlier. The residents won’t just settle for empty promises on hoardings. They want registries of their properties in hand,” Sisodia said.