Regularisation of the rot

We keep reading about various schemes that are brought out by state and central governments, periodically talking about 'Voluntary disclosure scheme' or 'Building / Land Regularisation scheme', (BRS / LRS) these are indeed steps to encourage dishonesty and a punishment for the honest.

Let's look at VDIS, a scheme that was announced in 1997 by the then Finance minster Sri P. Chidambaram. This facilitated a payment of 30% Income tax voluntarily on the previous decades income, with no questions asked. Many a person took advantage of this scheme, with one Ex. CM's son reportedly declaring about 500+ crores under this scheme, the so called biggest conversion of ill gotten money. Those days also we have heard many a murmur about how incorrect of these schemes which encourage people to be dishonest, waiting for the next amnesty. Fortunately nothing more had come after this as far as Income tax is concerned.

There were some effort in asking people to come out voluntarily and declare evasion of Excise duty/ CENVAT or sales tax after this. The success of this has not been publicised much.

We have the Building Regularisation Scheme (BRS), wherein a builder who violates the building construction, set back rules, can, by paying a penalty, regularise his/her misdeed. We have seen many a building which violates the rules, which are likely to be benefited by these BRS schemes. There was this hospital, which violated or never had a building plan permission and they have raised a multi storied Hospital in Chennai. Madras High court asked for it's demolition in Jan 2014 and i see this building still there and hospital is still functional. Only saving grace is out of the 5/6 floors, top two floors are incomplete and are not in use. Even the CMDA had been admonished by the HC for not acting for last 10 years.

I know of many a builder who has put up more than a floor than what his plan sanctioned, and made illegal profit and put their buyers at peril. I had faced this brunt, where in i had difficulty trying to sell the property, because the floor where my flat was, is an extra floor and an illegal one. Had to compromise, since the builder never even got it regularised during these schemes nor bothered to inform the buyers to do so.

I have known people who were privy to the information of impending GO of a BRS scheme, over night putting up a slab and regularise the illegal floor(s) under the scheme that will be announced. Most of the time the excuse given by the government is they don't

have the required manpower or wherewithal to demolish the illegal buildings, for introducing these schemes. Unfortunately our citizens also take these periodic schemes into consideration and wantonly violate the rules with impunity. Biggest threat of these violations is the danger to the super structure. While the original building was sanctioned for say 2 floors, when the additional floors are added, naturally it weakens the structural strength and there is a good chance of the building collapsing.

In another blog of mine Holistic - Who lives where, i had talked about how to cut down this menace, by monitoring the building plan sanctions at every level by linking it to the usage. Instead of having chawls like construction in every part of the town, wouldn't it be better if we have some kind of orderly development, where everyone follows the rules and not wait for the next B R Scheme.

Another threat factor is the approach to the courts and illegal buildings continue to thrive simply because, our legal system is enamoured with many a case which will take 10-15 years for them to see light of the day by clearing all the available options. after all that will be the political intervention citing humanitarian consideration, since people have been living there for decades.

Illegal constructions are sometimes protected by putting up a religious structure, once the religious structure comes up it becomes very difficult to  law enforcement agencies to do much and inevitably the illegal construction gets protected. It is another matter that today one can take the help of Google maps to see when the building came up, but no body would want to do that since that exercise will not yield any income either for the exchequer or the individuals.

Land Regularisation Scheme (LRS) is another bigger menace to an orderly development of cities. When there is so much emphasis is given for 'Smart Cities' and Digital India, we keep seeing dwellings in small lanes, once a panchayat layout but now part of a mega city. Many of us would have come across nomenclature like, Revenue plots, Panchayat layout etc., these are nothing but unapproved illegal layouts, which can result in one not getting proper drainage and power connections too. Housing loans will be difficult to get and living conditions will start deteriorating once all plots have buildings in it (most of them likely to be violated buildings). With increased earnings and affordability most of those living in these 20' road streets start owning cars, we can see the daily fun of traffic jams and quarrels etc.

Very rarely we will find illegal layouts being destroyed, simply because there is always a middle man who would have taken the land on agreement from the farmer and sold it to gullible buyers, no politician would like to hurt a potential vote bank, he will some how see that the layout stays put and we get to see these LRS coming up once in a while. However there was a situation in the newly formed state of Telengana, where they  wanted to regularise ownership of land by asking people to pay the penalty based on the current market value, since the market value was so high none of the illegal owners wanted to regularise under this scheme, since they had no threat to their living as such.

Can this be a citizen participatory movement to stop both illegal layouts and buildings. Status of land can be made available on the web with the zoning information. If i as a citizen see a new building  / layout coming up, i should have an option to upload the info into a government server with no option for the recipient to delete the same from the server. Probably with such situations our officials would be forced to act and report, what action was initiated on the illegal activity. Since all these are revenue yielding activities, government can even consider outsourcing the verification work (in the lines of Passport issue) and keep the regulatory control in its hands.

(Copyright of all photos used with the respective owners)