PUNE: The civic body has decided to bring down the regularisation charges of unauthorised constructions after getting a poor response to the gunthewari scheme.
“The state government has issued a directive, which will enable us to revise regularisation rates. The new rates will be declared soon,” said Prashant Waghmare, the city engineer of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC).
According to PMC officials, the response to the gunthewari scheme was poor because the regularisation cost was very high. The civic data revealed that only 24 proposals were cleared through the gunthewari scheme in the past three years.
According to PMC data, applicants have to pay three times more charges compared to the ready reckoner rates to get proposals approved. A property owner will have to pay around Rs5 lakh to Rs10 lakh to regularise a 100sqft property.
“Effectively, the regularisation charges are more than the prevailing market rates in some areas. So, it is financially prudent to construct property all over again instead of regularising the old one. As a result, many people avoid regularising their properties,” said a senior official of PMC.
Activists said more awareness is needed to make the scheme popular. One of them said some officials and politicians were safeguarding interests of those living in unauthorised properties, creating hurdles for regularising them through the Gunthewari scheme.
PMC said nearly one lakh properties, including in 34 merged areas, can benefit from this scheme. Constructions on gunthewari land till December 31, 2020, can be regularised under this scheme.
