Stilts with a tilt towards smaller developers

CHANDIGARH shows the world what India can achieve in terms of town planning aesthetics, but the rest of the country proves that Indians turn their urban spaces into unliveable monstrosities. Sure, the exception always proves the rule, and that is also the case with the report submitted to the Haryana government earlier this week by an expert committee on its ‘Stilt + 4 Floor Policy’. The name itself hints that the whole exercise could have been aimed at dishing out unseemly exemptions; else it could simply have been a committee to identify and demolish all structures violating the building code. Interestingly, the reference to the building code comes only in the context of its recommended revision, that too when the Haryana Building Code 2017 has only three references to the word ‘stilt’, none of which defines the stilted policy.

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Haryana seems to have forgotten that it can learn the best practices from its own capital, Chandigarh.

So, what is this policy and why is it important? It is something like the ‘wrong side driving’ of Gurugram and exemplifies the rot in the country’s millennial urbanisation process. It is a small but explicit peep into all that is wrong with the way we build our cities and how the corrupt officialdom and politicos make money during its dirty course. Investors or home-buyers in Gurugram or, for that matter, any Indian city have the option of either buying an apartment in a high-rise or purchasing a plot of land to build a home of their choice. Then there is a variant of the second option buying a pre-owned house. And modern town planning is done keeping these two options distinctly apart earmarking land for building high-rises or apartment complexes, and land to be developed as plots for the construction of individual houses. Even property-developing companies make this distinction clear by selling apartments and villas separately. So, there is no question of any possible mix-up.

In the National Capital Region’s residential colonies, the attempt is to turn independent plots and the houses on them into apartments. This became the accepted norm in Delhi, where space scarcity pushed residents to sell their high-priced plots to developers, who built several apartments where once a single house stood. Delhi accepted it, and it was a win-win scenario for the seller, the developer and the nouveau riche buyer. Who cares if the carriageway is too narrow for all the new cars or firearms are brandished in fights over parking slots or the power connections snap under ever-increasing burden or the sewers overflow, unable to cope with the increased capacity, or the sylvan neighbourhood is concretised and construction dust is all that one gets to inhale?

Keynesian animal spirits that have spoilt Delhi’s leafy neighbourhoods have now taken over Gurugram and elsewhere. But the irony is that if Delhi does not have land to build high-rises in most of its localities, Gurugram is a new city, which has ample space for high-rises and apartment complexes; yet the local authorities have for long allowed the conversion of regular plots meant for a single homestead into a veritable complex of four floors of apartments on stilts, with even the stilted areas turned into shops or servant quarters! Of course, in new India, all sidewalks are meant for parking (this, unfortunately, is the case even in Chandigarh). And if the pavements are not enough, use the roads how does it matter if this blocks the traffic?

The entire exercise of forming a committee and offering recommendations for conversion of plots into apartment floors seems aimed at offering loopholes to get away with the total defacement of residential colonies meant for independent houses. Every recommendation is an excuse to escape scrutiny. The first recommendation is to offer ‘construction of S+4 floors on residential plots of new (undeveloped) upcoming sectors/colonies/areas’ without even explaining why these areas could not be reserved for high-rises and apartment complexes in the first place. And that would probably explain the raison d’etre of the exercise. The big high-rise developers do not do the uglier conversion business. These recommendations seem to be tailored to help the smaller ‘conversion developers’, if one may call them so. Otherwise, why should a colony or area be first earmarked for residential plots and then the conversion of such plots into apartments be allowed? And smaller property developers are more dangerous because they are all local politicos.

For existing residential plots, the first recommendation is a clear giveaway, if one was required: allowing the construction of stilt-plus-four buildings in colonies or blocks within the colonies that are bound by roads of 12 metres or higher width. In a fully developed colony, even if the road is 12 metres wide, how can the infrastructure be augmented without re-laying the power and sewer lines? And there is no guarantee in the recommendations that the permission for conversion of plots will be given only after the augmentation of the infrastructure. Worse, only the width of the road is specified in the report, not the size of the plot. So, however small the plot is, if the road in front of it is 12 metres wide, a four-storeyed structure on stilts can come up on it. This is a strange rule.

The state government or the town planning department will not write out the standard operating procedure for infrastructure capacity audit, but this onerous job has been deputed to the vague ‘agency concerned’ under whose jurisdiction a colony or area or block falls, which could, in at least some cases, be the local politician-cum-developer. The audit is also to be done by the same ‘agency’. How easy and simple! All this when the Punjab and Haryana High Court had clearly said no to the ‘apartmentisation’ of residential plots. Haryana seems to have forgotten that Chandigarh is its capital and that it can learn the best practices from its own capital something that the committee promised to do at the outset.