After a delay of three years, the state is finally set to implement a unified development control rules policy for all municipal corporations, councils and nagar panchayats in Maharashtra, excluding Mumbai and a few surrounding areas.
The standardised rules will leave little scope for misinterpretation by local town planning officials, said government sources.
Thane, Navi Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad, Nashik, Nagpur, Solapur and Kolhapur will come under the ambit of the new rules, which are likely to bring uniformity in width of roads, size of rooms, etc. Height of buildings would, however, vary depending on the plot size and its FSI potential.
“The urban development department (UDD) has finalised the rules, to be formally notified now,” Bhushan Gagrani, UDD secretary, told
At present, while construction activities are allowed in a designated zone of one city, they may not be permitted in a similar zone in another city. “These ambiguities will now be removed under the unified rules, bringing in transparency and efficiency,” said Gagrani.
“Unified Development Control and Promotion Regulations is the single set of rules which will be applicable to the entire state except areas under the BMC, MIDC, Mumbai Port Trust, JNPT, eco-sensitive zones and the Navi Mumbai Airport Notified Area (NAINA),” said Gagrani.
The state has 27 municipal corporations, 392 municipal councils, 42,700 villages and 28,000 gram panchayats.
Nashik-based developer Rajan Daryani said the rules will remove incongruities. “In Pune, transfer of development rights (TDR) could be loaded on roads less than nine metres wide while in Nashik it was not permitted. In some cities, local authorities allowed 15% balcony areas while in some cities it was just 10%,” he said, adding that the unified rules must be put in “black and white” so that there is no scope for misinterpretation by local officials.
Pune-based developer Rohit Gera said that currently each corporation has had its own rules and “these have been interpreted differently over time in different jurisdictions”. “I certainly believe that there are many issues that could be combined under a unified set of rules. However, there needs to be room for local nuances. Pune, for example, has air force restrictions. To the extent there are local issues and if they are addressed, I see no issues in having unified rules for the state,” he said.
Gera cautioned that if too much construction activity is permitted under the unified rules, those towns which do not have the requisite civic infrastructure to support increased floor space index (FSI) could suffer. Atul Chordia, chairman of Panchshil Realty, which built Trump Towers in Pune, said, “For any developer who wants to do multi-city operations, he must refer on only one DCR. To a large extent, building impediments will be removed and the process will be simplified.”
Prashant Saroday, a Nagpur builder, said construction activity in cities and towns across the state had been affected as builders and architects waited for the new rules. “They did not want to take their building permissions under the existing rules since they wanted to take advantage of the unified DCR,” he said.