Chief secy asks Housing Department to prepare land use plans for entire State

Chennai:

With only five per cent area coming under planned development despite
the State being among the most urbanised in the country, the top
authorities in Tamil Nadu have turned their attention to the menace of
unplanned growth that is a sure recipe for urban development disaster.

Sources told Express that Chief Secretary Girija Vaidyanathan has
asked the housing department to prepare land use plans for the entire
state in an effort to curb the rampant unapproved layouts that are
sprouting across the State.

During a recent meeting to discuss draft scheme for regularisation of
unapproved plots and layouts in Tamil Nadu, the top bureaucrat
directed the housing department to prepare a not just a detailed note
on developing land use plans for the whole State, but also sought a
timeframe to complete the task.

Currently, only a meagre 5 per cent area in the State has a master
plan, while the growth is unplanned and thus haphazard in the rest 95
per cent area. Realising this, Chief Secretary Vaidyanathan suggested
the need for process of obtaining approvals in both plan and non-plan
areas, and an interim arrangement for uncovered areas.

The official has also asked the housing department to collect
information on the proportion of plan and non-plan areas in Andhra
Pradesh and Telangana, and the approval process they follow in respect
of layout and building proposals in the planned and non-plan areas,
along with programme to prepare land use plans.

The meeting also discussed the anomalies in the Second Masterplan for
Chennai wherein the low lying areas have been classified as private
water bodies. Sources said the chief secretary has sought the removal
of provision of private water bodies (low lying areas), as it would
mean that water bodies are regularised.

Sources said the fault lies with the Masterplan division which failed
to check whether the water bodies were indeed there at the site. The
division merely resorted to using Remote Sensing data, without
clarifying it with the concerned village administrative officer. As a
result, these areas are identified as private water bodies.

The CMDA planners have forgotten the water bodies identified during
the First Masterplan, which vanished under the Second Masterplan,
alleged officials.



Fact-file:

1. The area covered under Directorate of Town and Country Planning
(DTCP) is 1.28 lakh square kilometres.

2. The area covered under master plan is only 6,950 sq km

3. The non-plan area is 1.21 lakh sq km, or 95 per cent of the DTCP area

4. The first phase of preparing GIS based masterplan for seven
planning area has started with land use map being prepared by
Bharatidasan University