Thursday, December 18, 2014

HC-appointed Monitoring Panel Faces an Existential Crisis



C Shivakumar



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 by monitoring
committee, 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

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