E-Paper
Pune civic body denies regularising unauthorised properties in biodiversity park
PMC reserved 979 hectares of land 19 years ago under the BDP reservation in Pune city development plan for 23 merged villages
The Maharashtra government has given an extension to regularise the construction in the gunthewari area which raises a possibility of regularising unauthorised construction in the Bio-Diversity Park (BDP), however, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has denied the possibility as the state has already mentioned that regularisation will not happen in the no-development zone.
The BDP falls under the no development zone.
The PMC reserved 979 hectares of land 19 years ago under the BDP reservation in Pune city development plan (DP) for 23 merged villages.
The purpose of reserving the BDP is to save the hill slope and hilltop in order to maintain greenery in the city. The state government merged 23 new villages in 1997 in the old Pune city limit. After that, the civic body made a development plan for 23 merged villages in 2005. After that, the state government gave an approval to the 23 merged villages DP in parts.
In 2015, the state government took a decision to give 8 per cent green Transfer Development Rights (TDR) to landowners as compensation and acquire the BDP land. However, owners are not happy with compensation and they want cash compensation instead of TDR as rates are very low.
Most BDP land belongs to Private owners
In the 23 merged villages development plan, the civic body proposed and reserved a total of 978 hectares spread over seven hills in the 12 villages. It includes 124.45 hectares of government land and 853.09 hectares of privately owned land.
At present, due to less amount of compensation, most of the BDP land has encroached. Some landowners are selling land in small pieces in the market.
Vandana Chavan, Member of Parliament (MP) of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) said, “I met Kumar on the background of construction activity on various Biodiversity sensitive hills in the city. There has been no action taken by PMC despite the state government appointing a beat officer. The plotting on these sensitive zones is taking place without any obstacle. Various builders in the city are constructing on natural water sources blocking their flow. PMC has done the mapping of all the natural water sources and they should be made open to people.”
Rajendra Raut, superintendent engineer of building permission and construction said, “The PMC is taking action on unauthorised construction in the BDP area. On the other hand, there will be no regularisation of constructions on BDP areas. The BDP has been reserved in the development plan. We will also set up a single system to scrutinise the plan, maps attached to the gunthewari proposal.”
