The civic body, at the bidding of police, is taking steps to check the mushrooming of ceremony houses.

Under a policy being drafted by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), several factors will be taken into consideration before a house is allowed to be rented out for social occasions.

About 40 per cent of the ceremony houses in Calcutta will fail to meet the new criteria and their licences will not be renewed, said an official in the civic licence department.

Availability of parking space, location of the house and alternative roads available to traffic are some of the factors that will be considered for issuing permits. The new policy will be announced by mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya in his budget speech for the year 2008-09.

At a recent meeting with the mayor and the civic commissioner, police commissioner Gautam Mohan Chakrabarti spoke on how the growth of ceremony houses has led to traffic-related problems in the evening in areas like Ballygunge Circular Road, Gurusaday Dutt Road, Syed Amir Ali Avenue and Ballygunge Phari.

“The residents of several localities have complained that they are being disturbed by programmes organised in ceremony houses,” said the licence department official.

There are only 350 registered ceremony houses in the city. The CMC earns an annual revenue of Rs 1.5 crore from them. The daily rent of the houses varies from Rs 6,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh. The houses pay between Rs 20,000 and Rs 1.1 lakh to the civic body as annual charge.

According to a civic body estimate, there are about 2,000 unregistered ceremony houses in the city. Most of these are in Behala, Jadavpur, Santoshpur and Garden Reach.

On an average, a ceremony house is rented out on 180-200 days a year, said the licence department official.

The bigger the function held at a ceremony house, the greater the traffic bottleneck, since most of the invitees come in cars, said a senior traffic police officer.

“For the sake of a small hike in revenue, we cannot allow traffic chaos that inconvenience local people the most,” said the municipal commissioner.