CHENNAI: The High Court appointed monitoring committee is caught in a ‘catch 22’ situation over its relevance and will be seeking clarification from Madras High Court whether the regularization scheme of 1999 is valid or whether the 2007 regularisation scheme under the new amendment to Town and Country Planning Act passed in February 2013 is applicable.
Talking to Express after a three hour deliberations, a monitoring committee source told Express that as per the judgement of Madras High court which laid the guidelines for regularization scheme of 1999, it gave sanctity to monitoring committee.
Unfortunately, the new guidelines under the two new Government orders, which was framed by the state government and later stuck down by Madras High Court, never specified the role of monitoring committee. “We are caught in a Catch 22 situation.
It is a chaos like situation,” the source said. It is learnt that the monitoring committee will be submitting a report to the High Court in this regard as well as other issues since it was created by High court in 2006.
Interestingly, Justice Rajeswaran committee appointed by the state government is framing fresh guidelines to implement Section 113C which calls for implementation of regularization scheme from 2007.
“They have to submit the revised guidelines within three months. Already a month has passed,” sources said.
“This is one time scheme. Even Madras High court stuck down regularization scheme for 2001, 2002 and 2003 while upholding the validity of section 113A then what is the use of enforcement mechanism or any building laws or town planning,” sources said.
Sources stated that the state government has never acted upon any recommendation of monitoring committee except the one on streamlining completion certificate.
“The streamlining of completion certificate has brought down building violations but had they acted upon the recommendation of taking action against the erring officials and builders responsible for violation besides streamlining the planning process things would have been better,” sources said Sources said government has also not acted upon monitoring committee recommendation to strengthen enforcement mechanism.