Scroll.in: Gujarat: Tuesday, March
28, 2017.
A curious
missive from Bharatiya Janata Party MP Chandrakant Raghunath Patil to the Surat
Municipal Corporation asking it not to respond to queries made under the Right
To Information Act a Central law enacted in 2005 has brought into focus the
problem of rampant illegal construction in this port city of Gujarat.
In the
letter, dated February 3, the MP from Navsari in Surat district alleged that most
Right to Information applicants file frivolous queries in order to extort money
from others using the information they obtain.
The majority
of Right to Information queries made with the civic body in Surat concern
illegal construction.
Citing this
fact, Patil wrote: “After receiving the information, citizens blackmail the
illegal construction owners or even give threats of demolition.”
Patil went on
to instruct the Surat Municipal Corporation to not respond to such Right To
Information applications, and asked it to prepare a list of its applicants and
blacklist them. The MP also recommended that his recommendations should be
discussed when the civic body’s coordination committee meets. The Surat
Municipal Corporation circulated the letter to all its officials on February 3,
and sent it to its coordination committee the next day.
Illegal
construction rampant
Surat,
considered to be the financial capital of Gujarat and one of its fastest
growing cities, has seen rampant illegal construction over the last few years.
The matter is
clearly of interest to its citizens.
“In 2015,
15,270 RTI applications were filed [in Surat] and a whopping 70% of them were
about illegal construction,” said Ajay Jangid, a Surat-based Right to
Information activist and a member of the National Campaign for People’s Right
to Information. “Between 2011 and 2015, the Vigilance Department in Surat
received more than 3,400 cases related to illegal construction. All of these
cases were handed over to the Vigilance Department in light of the nexus
between [municipal] corporators and builders.”
Illegal
construction activity is more common in the older parts of Surat. It is often
cloaked in the garb of restoration and renovation. “There are cases where a
builder seeks permission to renovate an old building on paper and demolishes
and rebuilds it instead,” said Jangid. “Thirty percent of the total number of
illegal constructions are cases where property is built on a disputed piece of
land. Another 30%-40% are cases where builders have added illegal floors above
the sanctioned number of floors. Cases where the builders build commercial
complexes in a property sanctioned as residential constitutes about 20% of the
total number of illegal cases.”
Most of these
illegal constructions do not follow safety regulations such as earthquake and
fire safety-related construction guidelines. But the civic body has largely
turned a blind eye to them.
Builder-corporator
nexus?
In 2011, the
Bharatiya Janata Party government in Gujarat passed the Gujarat Regularisation
of Unauthorised Development Act, which it started enforcing the following year.
The law provided for the regularisation of illegal constructions, subject to a
few conditions, after the payment of what was called an “impact fee”. At that
time, the government estimated that there were about 25 lakh illegal
constructions in the entire state. However, the response to this proposal was
poor as, in most cases ,the impact fee was as high as the cost of construction.
Hitesh
Jariwala, a businessman, faced apathy by the Surat Municipal Corporation when
he flagged illegal construction in a plot adjoining his in Mahidharpura, an
area in the old city.
Because of
the area’s narrow alleys, some of which are only three feet across, the height
of buildings is limited to three floors. “In late 2012, when they started
building above the third floor, I filed an RTI asking for information about the
construction,” said Jariwala.
The Right to
Information query revealed that the builder had flouted several norms.
“However,
after I took up the matter with the then corporator of the area and other
officials of SMC [Surat Municipal Corporation], they did nothing,” said
Jariwala. “In fact, 15 days after my complaint, SMC sent me a WhatsApp from
their online portal stating that the plan of the building was sanctioned.”
Over the next
five years, Jariwala said that he knocked on several doors, in vain. Instead,
the municipal corporation subsequently sent him two notices asking him to
demolish a balcony on the first floor of his home because it encroached upon
the lane.
The
neighbouring building now stands seven-storeys tall.
“This is not an isolated case,” said Jariwala.
“Currently, about 30 buildings are being constructed in Mahidharpura area alone
and 98% of them are illegal constructions.”
Transparency
needed
Many of these
illegal constructions have been traced to officers of the civic body or to
members of the ruling party in Gujarat.
In September
2015, the Surat Municipal Corporation received multiple complaints from
residents of Chhaprabhata area of Katargam, a suburb of Surat, against a
builder, Anil Janjmera, the nephew of Surat mayor Niranjan Janjmera. According
to reports, the following month, the municipal corporation demolished three
illegal under-construction buildings amid police protection.
In another
instance last September, after some internal bickering, 26 out of 80 BJP
municipal corporators submitted a memorandum to Surat Municipal Commissioner
Milind Torawane seeking the demolition of an illegally-constructed office of
BJP corporator Ravindra Patil in Limbayat area of Surat.
Ajay Jangid,
however, is of the opinion that frequent demolition will not help curb the
problem of illegal construction, which has led to corruption with builders
bribing civic officials and corporators to turn a blind eye whenever they are
sent a notice of demolition.
Instead, said
Jangid, the Surat Municipal Corporation should get more transparent in its
dealings with the public. For instance, he said, if the approved blueprint of
all city buildings is available for any member of the public to scrutinise, the
scope of civic officials using their discretion to sanction any illegalities
later would shrink.
“Pune
Municipal Corporation has all its documents archived and maintains a library
where any civilian can avail any document every Monday,” said Jangid. “SMC
[Surat Municipal Corporation] should also upload every sanctioned blueprint on
its website and make the process transparent.”
‘Unconstitutional
letter’
Meanwhile,
following CR Patil’s letter to the Surat civic body, the Mahiti Adhikar Gujarat
Pahal an organisation that works to spread awareness about the Right to
Information Act at the grassroots has written to Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra
Mahajan to protest against the member of Parliament’s attempt to malign Right
to Information activists without providing facts to substantiate his claims.
“Such an act
is unconstitutional,” said Pankti Jog, the organisation’s executive secretary.
“We also started a mass letter campaign condemning the act and to send a message
to our elected representatives.”
Patil
explained why he sent the letter to the Surat civic body in a statement that
said: “I have evidence of several cases where applicants having gathered
information regarding illegal constructions [have] demanded demolition of the
property. However after extorting money from the concerned builder, they always
take back the demand for demolition. People have [the] Right to Information but
it is misused in such cases here. Hence I had to write such a letter.”
Following the
furore over Patil’s letter, last week, the Surat Municipal Corporation said in
a notification that it did not intend to stop responding to RTI applications.