Corporation expecting 30 crore revenue

Tirupati: The revival of the building penalisation scheme (BPS) is expected to fetch Rs 25-30 crore to Municipal Corporation of Tirupati (MCT), besides, giving much relief to the owners of the buildings that were constructed in violation of the building rules and also deviating from the approved plan. 

Civic body sources said that this time they are expecting more applications for the regularisation than in 2015 as it was the last chance for the building owners to get the much-needed regularisation before the elections. The Municipal Administration and Urban Development department issued the notification last month for the revival of BPS, duly with the guidelines.

Speaking to The Hans India, Assistant City Planner (ACP) Gunasekhar said that this time the government made BPS simple and transparent so as to ensure the entire process of regularisation which is online right from filing of the application till approval hassle-free and also fool-proof to check any corruption. 

“Applicant building owner has to fulfil only one requirement i.e. giving the complete information of the building constructed including survey number site, measurement, location and building details, its value as per sub-registrar valuation, along with his Aadhaar and PAN numbers. The inbuilt system calculates the penal amount to be paid by the building owner for regularisation based on the building details submitted by him and a message (SMS) will be sent to the building owner immediately after the approval online.

There is no role of the Town Planning authorities except the field-level inspection of the site to tag the building (online) immediately after receiving the application as a form of certifying the existence of the building and the site is not objectionable, he explained.

The applicant has to pay a fee of Rs 10,000 for filing the application and later regularisation and penalisation amount after receiving the message of approval, he added. ACP said the BPS would be a boon to 450 building owners, who applied for BPS in 2015 but pending for various reasons. They can upload the details again to get approval under BPS 2019. 

In 2015, the Corporation received 2,312 applications under BPS in which 1,850 approved leaving 350 applications filed few days before the closure of the scheme due to servers down and another 100 could not be completed for want of payment, he said, adding that revival of BPS will benefit these pending cases. BPS would help house owners get ‘occupancy certificate’ which is must for availing facilities like water supply, underground drainage system connection from the urban local bodies (ULBs).